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 with the convergence of ancient Babylonian and Egyptian knowledge under 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 in the west, 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 go on to 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. However, the ancient Egyptian view is very different. One of the names of the planet they 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 astronomically and applied it in their specific cultures.

My goal in the coming weeks is to give more light to the Kemetic worldview and more specifically to the predynastic ways of knowing. The origins of a thing can be very different from what it later becomes well-known for.