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Book of the Celestial Cow (from Twitter)
Nov. 23rd, 2014 11:48 amSome interesting readings on Tumblr of my essay on the Book of the Celestial Cow.
The issue was raised there about the relationship the text posits between humans and Re. The way I read the myth, humanity is as though unborn before Re distances Himself from them. That distance is a big part of what it is to be alive, in the human sense, and of what it is to be a creator, in the divine sense. And so insofar as the distance is not there, humans are dying, not really having lived nor having resurrection, and Re is aged and impotent. All of this takes place in an eternal now, as myths do, with the temporal indicators in the narrative being purely relative.
As for whether other Gods would have the same relationship with humans as Re does in that myth, one cannot assume that. But there is clearly something parallel going on in that text with Sekhmet. The agedness of Re at the beginning of the myth is like His distance at the end, transposed to a different axis.
If creation were something that had happened at some discrete point in the historical past, like Christian creationists believe, then the creator would indeed be very aged. That's how that symbol works, I would say. That's what we're undoing, in the very act of reading the myth symbolically: we are giving life to ourselves and to the God.
As for the "unborn" status of humans in this myth, I'd compare the state of the cosmos in the reigns of Ouranos and of Kronos. Also, I think of Stricker's wild reading of the Book of the Earth, where the figures being "punished" are unborn.
The issue was raised there about the relationship the text posits between humans and Re. The way I read the myth, humanity is as though unborn before Re distances Himself from them. That distance is a big part of what it is to be alive, in the human sense, and of what it is to be a creator, in the divine sense. And so insofar as the distance is not there, humans are dying, not really having lived nor having resurrection, and Re is aged and impotent. All of this takes place in an eternal now, as myths do, with the temporal indicators in the narrative being purely relative.
As for whether other Gods would have the same relationship with humans as Re does in that myth, one cannot assume that. But there is clearly something parallel going on in that text with Sekhmet. The agedness of Re at the beginning of the myth is like His distance at the end, transposed to a different axis.
If creation were something that had happened at some discrete point in the historical past, like Christian creationists believe, then the creator would indeed be very aged. That's how that symbol works, I would say. That's what we're undoing, in the very act of reading the myth symbolically: we are giving life to ourselves and to the God.
As for the "unborn" status of humans in this myth, I'd compare the state of the cosmos in the reigns of Ouranos and of Kronos. Also, I think of Stricker's wild reading of the Book of the Earth, where the figures being "punished" are unborn.
