Susan Brind Morrow - The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

for K.R.

How can we talk about netchers? he said, by which he meant primary hieroglyphs, pristine archaic nouns, words that would be drawn directly from nature.

You can see this any day. It is both time and place at once. It is of transcendent beauty. It is the agent of all transformation. It is the origin of all things. It is so familiar that it is known by all. Yet so familiar it is forgotten and unseen. But even forgotten it is the one essential thing: the dawn.

But to go back, or forward, to the night: Orion rises in the sky, a giant man of light. There is an implicit angle in his rising, a diagonal, a path. In a single night on this path he will sail across the sky. There are the unmistakable brilliant three stars, Al Nilam, the string of pearls, that are his belt, and beneath it the short clustering dimmer line that goes down, Orions sword, the great Orion nebula, the green swirling clouds of space.

Above Orion on the diagonal is the red star in the root of the horn of Taurus, and below on the diagonal is Sirius, the sapphire star, the brightest star in the sky.

Anyone can see them, the jewellike stars going around the sky night after night, year after year, marking with exact geometrical precision, slightly altered each night by moments in time and geometrical degrees on the horizon that equal them, the progression of the night, of the season, and, coming back to its same coordinates, the year.

Thus the sky is an elegant clock, turning with visible arms, the Dippers swinging around the North Star, marking the deeply and gorgeously integrated life of everything on earth. If you were in China tomorrow it would mark the hours in precisely the same way that it does in upstate New York today, for the hours, horae , are stars.

This is a geometrical grid that anyone can see. Geometry in the truest sense: It measures the earth minutely. It has a life of its own. It is not abstract. It is not human. But you can know it. And to know it, to see it, belongs to a deep aesthetic sense that transcends what is human. The wail of the wild dog rises with the moon in the cold night air.

There is no need to look to anyone to explain it, this numinous world. The properties that extract us from it and render us back into itthe miracles of conception, birth, and deathare properties belonging to all that exists. Pure energy, the nature of light, underlies all. We emerge from and dissolve back into this radiant ground. Not only can you know this, you are this.

Poetry and religion arise from the same source, the perception of the mystery of life. Early Egyptian writing belongs to this universal language. The vehicle at work is associative thinking, in which metaphors act as keys to unlock a primeval human sense of the integrated living world. The meaning may not come across on the pedantic level, but on the poetic level it is transparent. Animal-headed gods, for example, seem alien, indeed ridiculous. When you think of them not as gods but as signifying the qualities of the animals themselves, they take on a different meaning. They resonate with an innate sense of animal motion, symmetry, force, color. What is al-chem-y , literally the Egyptian thing, or, as The American Heritage Dictionary defines it, the Egyptian practice of transmutation? What or where is the gold? One looks to the writing of Egypt to find out.

The task is to take a medium that is proverbially indecipherable and to enter it, as though entering a pyramid with a lamp that gradually illuminates what is there. The first step is to look at the words themselves, and then in the second step, through them, as though through an uncovered lens, to see what is written on the walls of the hidden book. The third step is to ask what it means, to seek the deeper design that is the key to this primary early religion. Hence this book has three partsthe language, the translation, and seeking the deeper design.

Hieroglyphic means mysterious, yet hieroglyphs themselves are instruments of absolute clarity that present a pellucid record of the natural world. This is writing as it first was, a mirror of life. Eliminating the dimensions of time and place and decay, it was a holy thing because it worked.

I began the study of hieroglyphs with the mind of a child raised with a keen awareness of nature. I was a freshman in the Classics Department of Columbia University at the age of sixteen when I stood in line at Salters Bookstore on Broadway to purchase Sir Alan Gardiners massive Egyptian Grammar for eleven dollars on a whim. Hieroglyphs were still offered as a course at Columbia in those days, though they were being phased out for lack of interest. I was one of three students of Roger Bagnall, a papyrologist working in Egypt, sifting through remnant shreds of Greek words. Immersed as I was at the time in Catullus and Pindar and Sappho, my thoughts were primarily on the construction of the line, how each one of these masters, in their own distinct way, crafted a line as though it were a physical thing, an instrument made to have a deep and palpable effect:

sophos o polla eidos phua,

mathontes de labroi

The one who knows

Is one who knows much in his own nature,

Those who learn are like crows

Pindar

Looking at Greek, you come to see words as tactile and alive. You are looking at words branching out from a phonic core, like the root of a plant. Though spelling varies, the root persists through root, red, rust, rose. The essence of writing was to get at the root and prod it into subtle tendrils of meaning.

Vivid imagery from nature, rhyming and elision, the beautiful construction of the line, were tools the Greek and Latin poets used to capture life in words. These devices were present throughout the literature of hieroglyphs. Yet hieroglyphs had a further dimension. The letters themselves had a living quality. They were composed of living animals and plants. In Egypt the phoenix is the blue heron rising in the swamp at dawn. The sky is green. The stars are flowers. In Egypt heaven is a wetland.

I was devoted in those days to Henry Fischer, the curator of the Egyptian collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because of the beautiful books he wrote. In The Orientation of Hieroglyphs , he had the unusual insight that the words themselves were like the tableaux on the walls of tombs. Hieroglyphs were miniature paintings and sculpture; tomb reliefs were giant hieroglyphs. The pictures and letters were the same thing. Fischer so knew and loved Egypt that when I would run into him over the years at an annual New Years party in Sherman, Connecticut, where he lived, he would turn to me at midnight and say, as though we were in Egypt, kuli senna inti tayyiba! He told me once that susan , a word that appears in the Pyramid Texts, was, he thought, the blue lotus of the Nilefor he was particularly interested in the hieroglyphs themselves, what they actually were , their humor, the charm of the verb msbb (to turn), written with the oryx characteristically bending back its head along its flank, as the curlew with its scimitar beak in the sand was the verb to find. The letter was a study of the animal. The words were living pictures.