On the one hand, I agree with and support the walkout and boycott of the event by POC, queer people, trans people, and allies. I grappled with the question of whether or not to attend or present at PantheaCon this year. How could it not be? This was, after all, the Last PantheaCon: a send-off, a farewell, and a wake for a convention unable to escape the shadow of its own past, including the walkout of a substantial number of Pagans of color, a boycott by several Pagan groups and organizations, and its own tempestuous relationship with transphobic “feminist elders.” (Full disclosure: I was one of many people who wrote to the convention in November 2018 asking that one of the presenters, a scholar and writer with deeply problematic ties to trans-exclusionary “radical feminism,” be removed from the program.) We were there a couple of weeks later.I’ve given this presentation before, and will do so again at Paganicon in March, but this occasion was special. The alignment would be very near perfect at the Winter Solstice, to which the temple is aligned. It shows the rising sun shining directly into the sanctuary of Amun, albeit somewhat misaligned. The photograph is one I took at Deir el Bahri Temple in January 2016. It will receive its own treatment in a subsequent post. One of those, Utterance 6 of the Temple Statue Ritual (Berlin Papyrus 3055), titled simply ky r(A) “Another Utterance”, contains a quite interesting version. There are more examples of the Morning Hymn text than are covered in ‘Waking the Gods’. The Egyptians had multiple versions, and we can too. No need to obsess over doing them one right way. They are meant as tools and (hopefully) take off points for your own practice. By all means experiment – sing them in English or Egyptian, for any God or Goddess, using whichever way of saying Their names that is meaningful to you, or chant them, or say them out loud. If you feel so moved, use them in your own devotions. The ‘Waking the Gods Handout’ provides a short form Morning Hymn vocalization for both a God and a Goddess and a pronunciation key. We sang about half of that Hymn as part of the presentation, diverging a little bit from the plan in the blurb text. You will notice that some of the material from The Morning Hymn for Seven Goddesses is included in the Pantheacon slides. Nevertheless, I will leave these here in the interest of documentation and as a reference point for some later posts, so I may refer back to them. These slides are clearly not the complete content of the talks and unfortunately the talks were not recorded. Weaving The Cloth Of Reality Presentation Presentation – PDF rendering of PowerPoint slides We will explore sound and how it can deepen our modern understanding and practice of Egyptian ritual by looking at current progress in reconstructing the pronunciation of Egyptian, analyze the layers of meaning in some simple ritual texts, and then pronounce them”. The goal is to please the Gods, re-energize Them, and sustain creation itself each day. Weaving the Cloth of Reality: Word and Sound in Egyptian Ritualĭescriptive blurb submitted for the Pantheacon Program: “Egyptian rituals use the sounds of words, along with their meanings, to connect to mythic themes and tie the ritual utterances together into effective tools. Presentation – PDF rendering of PowerPoint slides and a PDF handout distributed at the talk. We will end by learning to pronounce and sing choral portions of the hymn and then perform a complete hymn together for a God or Goddess”. Here are two presentations delivered at Pantheacon 2016: Waking up Gods, Waking up Creation: The Egyptian Morning Hymnĭescriptive blurb submitted for the Pantheacon Program: “We will explore the Morning Hymn used to waken the Gods and Goddesses in Egyptian Temples – covering the hymn’s history, meaning, parts, and performance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |