 So the first religion we'll look at in this course is an ancient religion and to the best of my knowledge nobody really practices it anymore. It's the Egyptian mythologies. Now it's easy to look at Egyptian mythology, to look at the pantheon of gods and to listen to the legends and to see that they have a god of air, a god of moisture, a god of the sun, a god of the earth, a god of the sky. To think that this is really just kind of all about, you know, they think that superheroes are in charge of the elements or something like that. It's easy to think that. It's easy to think that they are just merely primitives and they have really active imagination or something. It's easy to do that, but you know, it's something that I'm trying to teach you all this semester and something that I hope you learn along the way is if you don't take a person or group seriously for at least five minutes, you'll never understand them. And the point of this course is to understand these different religions. So like I said, it's easy to kind of dismiss what they're doing as the ramblings of folks that aren't technologically advanced. Okay, but there's something more happening here. There's something more than just mere, you know, superheroes in charge of the weather. No, there's a lot more. So I want to take a look at the mythology. Now, I'm not going to try to list all the different deities in the Egyptian pantheon that would be here for a long time. I'm not going to try to explain them, but I am going to highlight the primeval gods and see if we can't figure out kind of a major theme running through the rest of the mythology. So the first thing I want to look at is what I'll call the enemy, and that's chaos. Chaos is more or less the enemy in Egyptian mythology. Now, I'll say more or less because the relationship with chaos is a little complicated. So first I'll just start out with how it is the enemy. None is chaos. None is this, you know, non-existence. It's not actual existence. It's mere potentiality. It's merely what could be, but not is. So, you know, if you really kind of take this apart, you understand it a little bit. Nothing exists in none. No people, no gods, no ideas, nothing. These are just potentials, just the potential for existence. But what potentially exists doesn't actually exist. The potential, in a sense, is there for unicorns. But no unicorns, but it's just potential. No unicorns actually exist. So none is potential, is chaos in this sense, because nothing's there. It's not what is, but only what could be. And what could be, right, that could be unicorns or could not be unicorns. There could be dogs or could not be dogs. There could be, you know, 40,000 story buildings. There could not be 40,000 story buildings, right? That's why it's chaos is all this is happening, and not because it's merely potential and not actual. So this is chaos. This is the enemy. Now, it's the enemy in the sense that this world, for the Egyptians, all of this, is going to end in chaos. Ra will eventually give up and take everything back to nothingness. But it's also the source of everything. The first land formed out of chaos, and it was, you know, chaos is kind of pictured as the turbulent waters, right? Which is an image used by a lot of cultures. You know, think about it. You know, the turbulent waters, you can't exist there. You can't live there. But at the same time, it's kind of the source of your own sustenance, because, you know, you fish out of the waters. And miraculously, this living organism appears out of the dark murky depths, and you can eat it, right? So you can sustain yourself off of this. So, you know, like I said, the murky waters, the turbulent waters are the kind of image or the metaphor for chaos, for mere potentiality. But the first land was formed out of chaos, and the first god appeared on this land. And it wouldn't, presumably, the first god wouldn't appear without something to appear upon. And it was the first creator god. It's either raw, emin-raw, or raw atom, depending on what the mythologies say. The first god appeared on this land, and in some sense came out of, maybe, is a way to say, came out of chaos. Now, at least in some of the mythologies, there are these kind of gods of chaos. Oktawad, if I'm pronouncing that right. Oktawad. I don't know. I'm going to say Oktawad. Let's see if that works. There are these gods of the chaos. You've got Nun and Nounet. These are the gods of the primordial, of the turbulent waters, right? There's what's moving back and forth amongst chaos. Then you have Keck and Keckhet. These are the gods of darkness, the god and goddess. You have darkness, Nun and Nounet, the god and goddess of the turbulent waters. Keck and Keckhet, the gods of the god and goddess of darkness. Amon and Amoret, these are the gods and the goddess of invisible power. Interesting phrase, invisible power. And then, finally, Keck and Keckhet, the gods of boundlessness. Now, I can't pretend to be an expert in Egyptian mythology. I don't know where these various gods came from, but just take a minute and take a look at what these gods represent. They each look a lot like the ocean. You've got water, you've got darkness, you've got invisible power, you've got boundlessness. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, imagine that you're just plopped out in the middle of the waters. No land in sight. If you plummet to the depths, supposing you survive, if you plummet to the depths, you will see water all around you, all around, without boundaries, boundlessness. It will be dark because you're sinking to the depths. And you'll feel waves and you'll feel pressure upon you as you enter that water. But you won't be able to see from where it's coming from. That's invisible power. And there's a water itself. So it's not hard to see where some of these images for these gods came from, the metaphors, what they came from. And what the Egyptians are trying to do is they're trying to understand chaos. They're trying to understand nothingness and mere potentiality. So it's easy to dismiss what they're doing, but they're trying to comprehend disorder from which things come. Okay, so we have the enemy, chaos. The heroes, the opposite of enemy, order. Chaos is mere potentiality, but nothingness, not existence. Order is existence, and not even just mere potentiality, because that's chaotic, but what actually exists, what comes to be. Okay, so this order fights back against chaos, fights for its own survival, fights to avoid being reduced to nothingness again. And for order, we have the Enniad, we have the Nine Creator Gods. Now again, the beliefs, the mythology is very depending upon which period in history they're dealing with. But the Enniad is basically this. You have the first god, the one that appears on that mound. And this first god creates the other eight of the gods. So first is, I'm going to skip the names, right? I'll use what they are, what they represent, what they are. First you have air and moisture. Air and moisture. This is the first god and goddess created by the first god. Air and moisture in term give birth to earth and sky. Give birth to earth and sky. Now you notice what's happening here. You've got air and moisture, and you have earth and sky. Now, pay attention to something real quick. The sky is not the same thing as air and moisture. We're used to thinking of the sky as being the atmosphere. But that's not what's happening with Egyptians. The sky is different than earth and moisture. In fact, the earth and sky in mythology, the earth and sky embrace so tight and become pregnant that the children can't come forth. So it's up to sky to come in and separate. Excuse me, it's up to air and moisture. Excuse me, it's up to air to separate the sky from the earth. And to give the living creatures air to breathe and room to move about and be free. Now, as I said, it's kind of easy to think of some kind of fanciful imagination. But look what the Egyptians are describing. They're describing an order upon which everything can exist. Ground to walk upon. Sky to keep back the turbulent waters. Air and moisture to breathe and to give life and sustenance to plants and animals. That's the stage for life. That's what these Creator gods do. So on top of, in addition to the earth, sky, air, and moisture, there's two sets of twins. Osiris and Isis. And Osiris is the king. The king establishes government which is order and society. His sister is his consort. I know it's kind of disturbing to think about, but it's his, we would probably use the word wife. Then you have the other pair of twins, Set and, can ever pronounce her name right, Nephthys, I think Nephthys, I can't pronounce her name. I know somebody's going to get in the comments section and say, this is how you pronounce it. Fine, let me have it. And Set is the enemy. So you have a hero, a king, keeping order in society, and you have the enemy who's trying to fight against the order in society set. And Nephthys despises her brother set and even kind of looks after Osiris after he's been killed. Now with these primeval gods, first god, air and moisture, earth and sky, they set the order of how much everything can live, all living things can live. If there's no land, they're drowning in turbulent waters and chaos. If there's no air, they can't breathe. And without air, plants and animals can't live in sustained existence. Without a king, there would be chaos in society. There would be anarchy, disorder, people would be doing whatever they want to each other, everything else. And you know, maybe the Egyptians, you might wonder, where does Set come in all this as well? Order needs a champion. Well, so does chaos. So does chaos. So what the Egyptians have given us, they set this kind of stage, this explanation for order. You have the enemy chaos and all creation, if everything that exists, if it goes back to chaos, it ceases to exist. But even in that, there's an order. There's a cycle of, in a sense, reincarnation, rebirth. Yes, right now everything exists, but it's going to return back to none. And then after, I guess, some time or something like this, it will come out of none once again. So there's even a cycle of existence, which is an inherent order to the disorder, or at least an inherent order to existence and non-existence. Okay. And the gods, these primeval gods, set the stage, they set the pattern. They set the very conditions for life and flourishing. And happiness. So remember that we are analyzing or trying to understand these religions in terms of three main concepts, faith, belief, and action. And for the Egyptians, their faith is an order. Their faith is in the struggle between order and chaos. And order is on their side, that's existence. Chaos, mere potentiality, non-existence, will destroy them. Now even, and again, as I said, even in that destruction, there's still going to be a triumph of order, because existence will simply be reborn. So this cycle, this struggle between order and chaos, between existence and annihilation, between Ra and none. This is what the Egyptians have faith in. They believe this order is going to be the source of their fulfillment. It's going to be the measure by which they achieve all that they can. And their hero, Osiris, Ra, is the one in whom they have faith. They have order. They have faith, I should say. They have faith in existence and society. So now we come to the beliefs or doctrines with Egyptian mythology. And in one sort of way, there's really not much. There's really not much because there's not a whole lot that's very permanent. The mythology's changed from century to century to millennium to millennium. And they're around for 3,000 years. That's a long time to have a culture. The United States isn't even 10% of the way through that. So in some ways there's not a whole lot, but another way to look at it is there's just too much. Because the mythology's kept changing. It depends on which period in Egypt's history you want to consider the mythology before you even start looking at the beliefs. So in terms of doctrines, there's not a whole lot. Most of what we have regarding the Egyptian mythology is written for funeral rites. It's written on coffins or sarcophagi, I should say. It's written on temple walls. And that's where we get most of the mythology. So we don't have too much as far as beliefs for the Egyptians. Other than there is this struggle between Nun and Ra and the mythology surrounding Osiris. At some point it looks like Osiris and Set were brothers. They were twins, but they were brothers. And they're enemies. And it looks like Horus was another hero and a son of Osiris. So some of those things you can easily read the material that I gave you and start listing some of those relationships and individual deities and the heroes and the enemies and figure out the relationships between each other. There's something like an afterlife for this Egyptian mythology. But the main emphasis that the Egyptians had or the main thing that mattered the most to the Egyptians was it a set of beliefs or doctrines that they write down and memorize? Rather it's the cultic worship. So now we have the actions for Egyptian mythology. Now the actions that mattered the most to the Egyptians were the cultic worships, the rituals that they performed in order to maintain this battle to keep up the battle against chaos. They thought that the worship, the ritual, is what allowed Ra to continue his fight against none. That is what maintained the balance in Egyptian society. If you messed up the rituals, Egypt was thrown into chaos. The Nile wouldn't flow right or people would die or society would fall apart or whatever. So they believed that what the worship really is is maintaining this relationship with the deities. And everybody had their own proper God. Not everybody worshipped Ra and Ra alone. You had your own God, probably depending upon what you had to do. So God's of agriculture worshipped or you maintained worship for the gods or if your God was the Nile, you maintained worship of the Nile. So what mattered the most for the Egyptians here was not the beliefs are getting the fact straight. It was maintaining that worship, maintaining that ritual, maintaining that contact with the gods. And when you did that, you helped maintain order. So also for the Egyptians you had your actions in your physical life, but there was also an afterlife. And this was also important. When you died, you were judged. And what's kind of interesting here, reading the description, the judge was not somebody else, it wasn't one of the gods. Rather the judge was you. Your soul was weighed against a feather. And if it was heavier than a feather, and by that they meant that your conscience was heavy. If you regretted actions, if you thought you did wrong, if you worked against society, against order, and that weighed upon your conscience, well, you condemned yourself. That condemnation was a punishment, I think was being eaten by some kind of horrible lizard. But if you did well in society, if you maintained your place, if you did not condemn yourself, if you're honestly reflected on your life and you thought you did well in society, regardless of your station, then you got to join the fight against chaos with Ra. You got to join him in that battle. So to reiterate, Egyptian mythology is your actions that matter more than your beliefs. So I've talked about at least some of Egyptian mythology. Now again, I haven't given this grand exposition to all the gods of Egypt. But I think we've touched on what kind of starts with all the underlying structure for all the mythologies. And it's this faith in order, it's this faith in the value of existence as opposed to just mere potentiality and the value in hierarchy and structure to society. And again, it's kind of easy to dismiss what they're doing, some kind of primitive imagination. All right, I mean, you can say that. But let's be honest, that imagination has not left us. The Egyptians had their cosmology, okay. But we have ours, and we talk about the Big Bang. And there's lots of ways to describe the Big Bang. Some people will say, where did the Big Bang come from? And you say, well, nothing. There was nothing before the Big Bang. Well, that sounds an awful lot like saying this world came out of none. It came out of chaos. Existence just popping into existence from out of existence. We talk about the cycle of the universe, right? And we talk about at least some theories about the universe is that the universe started with the Big Bang from a singularity and exploded all the matter ejected onto the universe. And it's currently heading outward, right? But at some point, gravity's going to take a hold of everything and bring it all back together in the Big Crunch. And then after the Big Crunch, there'll be a Big Bang. Well, it kind of sounds like a cycle of existence and non-existence. Existence and non-existence, just like everything will go back to none. We, there are even theories that this world is one amongst the infinite possibilities of worlds, or that we exist amongst all potentiality. Again, that kind of sounds like this struggle, this relationship between chaos and order, between potentiality and actuality, between non-existence and existence. We're still grappling with the same questions. We're still grappling with the same sorts of issues. And as far as, you know, if you look at the Egyptian cultic worship, it's like, hmm, that's some weird stuff. Well, you know, we devote people's lives. We devote resources, time, money. People risk their lives. And people have died. And in our pursuit of trying to understand this causal order, in our pursuit of trying to understand the causal laws of nature and the composition of various objects, and at bottom what is really matter, we have our own devotions to order, to understanding it all. We call the project science.