Kanda & Maat

The temple of Dendera is where one of the oldest representations of the zodiac including the sun, moon and five classical planets of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn along with the signs Aries through Pisces was found. This imagery was made in the convergence of ancient Babylonian and Egyptian knowledge passed down through a Hellenistic worldview.

This mixing of knowledge can lead to great insight but if one does not truly understand the context from which those ideas are coming from the deeper meaning and true benefits can be missed completely. The words we use are projections of cultural ideas. We’ll use the morning star, the planet called Venus, as an example.

Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty mirroring the Greek goddess Aphrodite. The Roman and Greek mythologies associated with the goddesses influence the interpretations of the planet. Ianna, the Sumerian goddess, and Ishtar, the name used by the Babylonians, share the similar attribute of the goddess of love like Venus and Aphrodite. The ancient Egyptian view is very different. One of the names of the planet used was seba dja benu usir or the sailing star phoenix Osiris. The stories and attributes are quite different between Osiris and Venus. These differences must be taken into account in order to understand how each culture understood it in and applied it in their specific cultures.

My goal in the coming weeks is to give more light to the Kemetic worldview, specifically to the predynastic ways of knowing.