On the river
when disembarking at a flowered island
on the upper Nile and besieged by vendors
pressing trinkets on us, finally I found
a tiny statue of the Edfu temple falcon
-- from Late Morning: New and Selected Poems

It was after my first visit to Edfu that I had the single most profound experience of all my travels in Egypt.
I had performed an inconspicuous personal ritual in one of the temple's chapels invoking Horus, the hawk-headed son of Osiris, to whom I have always been drawn. Later that night, aboard the hotel boat on which we were traveling, I became ill. Others of my colleagues had previously succumbed to the gastric discomfort and diarrhea commonly known among tourists as "Pharaoh's Revenge," and so I wasn't especially alarmed despite my sudden high fever and nausea. I retired to my cabin where my wife Mary saw me to bed. Being shipboard and en route that night didn't help my stomach. Then came the chills. I began shivering uncontrollably, despite covering with every blanket in my cabin, but when Mary checked on me I assured her that I would be fine, told her I thought she should have dinner with our friends as planned. I asked her to try to obtain from the ship’s management some of the antibiotics that were always available in Egypt to treat a sick tourist stomach.

Alone in the cabin while the boat rocked beneath me and the shores of the Nile flowed past my porthole, I soon fell in and out of consciousness. After some time, Mary returned with a member of the ship’s crew who carried on his tray a bowl of steamed white rice, a bottle of warm Coca Cola, and a plastic pack of antibiotic tablets.

This kindness practically moved me to tears. I sipped the stomach soothing beverage, took the medicine, and although I experienced no immediate relief, I was encouraged enough to insist that Mary rejoin our friends on deck under the starry night sky.

Alone in my cabin while the boat rocked, room dark and outside the wheeling constellations: I watched the bobbing stars and tried to meditate but soon had to draw the curtains closed to keep from becoming more seasick. Then, in the lightless cabin, I began to hallucinate. Images from the Edfu temple walls suddenly streamed past my open eyes, and I felt as if I were living within the temple and could comprehend the surrounding hieroglyphs and carvings. The temple's "book" pertained directly to my own life because the story truly is universal. Horus Behdeti, the son of Osiris, the falcon god-form or neter, who avenges the death of his father on his wicked uncle Set illustrates the principles of contradiction and reconciliation. That night, I felt this in a way that was completely personal.

I was experiencing something sacred, and sacrificing my ideas of health or well-being, strength and power, I suddenly felt as if the myth were opening beyond my ideas about the story’s meaning. Like a temple initiate, I understood the symbolism with both my mind and the intelligence of my heart. I was stunned to realize that the battle between Horus and Set – opposing forces of light and darkness -- would continue as long as our world continued, and for me would continue as long as I was reborn in this world. It was a frightening thought: to be trapped forever between warring forces as if within a recurring dream. I sensed keenly the pain of reincarnation and the necessity of breaking free from the cycle, because our time-bound world is marked by impermanence and suffering.

All this as I lay sweating and shivering under blankets, nauseous but unable to vomit or move my bowels, my digestive track clogged with stone. While I had been rather cavalier earlier on, now in my delirious state, I was seized with the fear that I might be far more ill than I had thought, and that in fact I might be poisoned and dying. And still the story would not stop unrolling before my eyes in the dark cabin.

I summoned up my courage and shouted aloud that whatever was to come I was ready to meet it open-eyed. This was the way I had always wanted to meet death, and I was confident now, delirious but physically and spiritually present to the moment. I could die and I was ready to die, but I would enter the mystery with attention and courage. Suddenly tears of gratitude sprang from me: "It's true, it's true!" I shouted, as the words of the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart came to me: "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."

A moment later, my fever broke: I was suddenly soaked in cooling sweat. I roused myself from bed, ran to the tiny toilet of my cabin and opened my guts.

* * *
Following the Symbolist interpretation of A. E. Schwaller de Lubicz, I think that Set can be said to represent the principle of restriction and the force of negation on which dualistic thinking depends. Our rational minds define and delimit experience through affirmation and negation, and so, in this respect, Old Uncle Set would seem to constitute if not a “necessary evil,” then an unavoidable fact of ordinary existence.

For the ancient Egyptians, the neter Set is a personification of the desert, red and arid, binding the green breadth of the Nile Valley, just as in the story he binds the green body of Osiris within a perfectly fitted casket; Set helps give shape and drama to the geographical features of the Black Land, and to one of its essential myths. Set's character and behavior recall the Genesis serpent, his temptation of Eve, and the subsequent disobedience of our “First Parents.” How can even the most literal minded reader deny that the Tempter has an important role to play in the Genesis drama? And later on in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Job, doesn’t the interaction between Yahweh and Satan seem like that of collaborators as they test the faith of Job, an entirely just man, by depriving him of everything earthly he loves? The triumph of Job’s faith in his god requires a field of contradictions, a rather wicked play of polarities whereby conventional ideas of “good” and “evil” must temporarily be dispensed with so that eventually they can be experienced as relative truths.

Osiris and Set are brothers (their sister is Isis, the wife of Osiris) and throughout the cycle of their mythology, the relationship between “light” and “dark” forces is similar to the dynamic represented by the Chinese symbol of the Daichitu – the black and white “Yin-Yang” picture of swirling energy. As the Chinese philosophers saw it, when one of the elements

is at its most expansive, the other begins to reform within the circle that holds them. Another reminder of their interdependence is that each of the shapes is flecked with the color of its opposite precisely at the point where its area swells to a maximum. There are representations of this interdependency in other systems of thought, too, such as that of the ancient Maya, whose symbol, Hunab Ku is quite like the Daichitu. In some European alchemical treatises the dance of polarity is symbolized by the sexual intercourse of King and Queen, and in Tibetan Tantra, the Yab-Yum iconography of male and female Buddhas indicates the same dynamic.

The Chinese say that this archetypal polarity is found in everything. In this respect, the Fall from Eden, usually understood to be a warning against temptation and a reminder of human frailty (especially that of women) and the punishment for disobeying Yahweh, can also be interpreted to mean that the quest for the knowledge of good and evil is inherent to our human condition. Truth be told, we learn from experience that includes suffering.

Schwaller reasons that the myth of Horus the Avenger cannot culminate in the complete destruction of Set precisely because such polarities as light and dark, good and evil are intrinsic to ordinary life. Horus in obtaining triumph over Set does not destroy him, but rather holds him at the tip of his lance. This iconography is similar to the Christian one of Michael the Archangel treading Satan beneath his heel, pinning the devil at his sword tip until the end of time. Likewise, Saint George is traditionally pictured as a knight astride his white steed with a writhing serpent fixed at the tip of his lance, rather than an ordinary knight exulting in the slaughter of a dragon.

There is a “tension” in such depictions, a symbolic “holding” of the opposites, as Jungian psychology would say. Building on the observations of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, C. G. Jung went further to postulate a principle known as Enantiodromia, which describes the propensity of opposites to exchange identities, as the D’ai Chi symbol shows. An awareness of this dynamic can help a person to move beyond a simplistic view of life’s contradictions -- one that is limited by the illusion of absolute triumph and absolute defeat. Without a capacity to imagine reconciliation, Jung warned that because of our unconscious projections, we are more likely to see an other partially -- that is, through the lens of duality – which makes another person, idea, religion seem to us to be completely beautiful, good and desirable or else completely horrid, evil and threatening. Because we project our desire or aversion on the other, we fail see them impartially. Objectively speaking, relatedness is a given of the universe – everything already is in balance, but to realize this dynamic dance requires that an individual withdraws his or her projected hopes and fears from the other.

Finding this balancing point is usually a matter of trial and error: books can teach you about it, but the knowledge is ultimately experiential. Learning to feel the balance in every situation is analogous to the way you learn to swim, or make music, or keep a two-wheel bicycle upright by pedaling with both feet.

* * *

The Temple of Abydos and the smaller, nearby structure called the Osirion commemorate the place where the head of Osiris was supposed to have been buried long, long ago in “myth time” when his brother Set dismembered him. The current temple was begun by the illustrious New Kingdom Pharaoh, Seti the First (note the root of his name, indicating something other than the wholesale repudiation of the Sethian principle.) Seti’s son, the Great Ramses II, completed it, more than 3,000 years ago. The splendid temple we see today has in part been restored. Within this oddly modern looking structure, within its many room-size chapels, large, painted bas-reliefs show a series of ritual activities that probably pertain to various initiations into the cult of Osiris. The colors of the paintings, reds and ochres and lapis lazuli blues are still brilliant all these years since they were painted.

On one of my visits, feeling overloaded with the information conveyed by my guides and guidebooks, I sought solitude to meditate before some scenes of the story that I recognized. In that ageless silence I was quite certain I heard the gentle tinkling of bells and the soft chanting of female voices. Because Abydos is so full of tourists, many of them Muslim school children, it is not the sort of place where Western “meditation people” might stage a New Age ritual at midday. But my vision, or my hallucination, call it what you will, didn’t seem so unusual to me: such experiences occur for pilgrims at sacred sites.

My rational mind still sometimes wonders if these are actually self-induced trances, waking dreams that might be called “wish fulfillments” by Sigmund Freud. However, I cannot easily dismiss the facts of their occurrence, nor, more importantly, the consequences for my life. I know enough not to surrender every mystery to the rational mind’s impulse to contain and constrict reality. Pattern recognition, sudden insights or revelations, and the ability to predict the course of some natural events were probably important evolutionary stages for human development, and I would call this the Sethian impulse at our service. I find no contradiction between such thinking and other models that include but also go beyond the rational one. I believe that “mind” is more than “mine,” and that memory is more than one person’s imaginative ability to ravel out the myth of his days.
I know myself to be a dynamo of energy, my tiniest parts constantly in movement, alive and changing and continuous with powers far greater than my small capacity to comprehend. For example, I marvel that my organism retains the plan from which this thing I call “myself” seems to emerge and disappear and reemerge moment by moment. Contemporary science has shown me that I am interpenetrated by a world that is also simultaneously in flux, but perpetually organized. Isn’t this sort of continual resurrection what the Way of Osiris implies -- that each moment is a rebirth and therefore another opportunity for a conscious life?

Like so many who have loved ancient Kemi, the Black Land of the fertile Nile Valley, and who feel drawn to visit present day Egypt, I can believe I have lived here in the past. Perhaps I was a kitchen slave, or a stable boy, or a courtesan dancing for Pharaoh; perhaps I gazed on the white clad, electrum-capped pyramids at Giza, when I was an initiate at the feet of the Sphinx. According to Schwaller, the Osirian Way was open to all, and so everyone, from a stable boy to the Pharaoh might aspire to become a resurrected “Osiris” after death. Schwaller further speculates that there were also opportunities in the afterlife to improve one’s spiritual state and find a path that led beyond even the concept of an afterlife in Paradise. Perhaps one of the souls, or levels of consciousness (there were supposed to be nine) of the deceased could return to his or her mummy in a properly prepared tomb to continue developing higher consciousness. Within the tomb, texts and symbols were inscribed specifically for the benefit of instruction and inspiration for the deceased, the tomb perhaps serving as a way station along a path that could culminate in liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

We do not know if this was so. We have marvelous artwork and hieroglyphics that thrill us; we have splendid poetry in celebration of life, of love, of the stories of the Egyptian gods, the neteru. But like so much pertaining to the Pharaonic Egyptians, we are left finally with many unknowns. Every guide, every companion is in the end provisional, whether we are tourists and pilgrims traversing the Nile Valley today or Osirian souls traveling the timeless Duat. We can prepare but what we prepare for is not predetermined – at least I can’t believe it is, since then the universe would be a soulless mechanism, and my experience tells me otherwise.

* * *

Horus, the son of Osiris was miraculously conceived “in the Spirit,” while Isis in the form of a bird hovered over the “dead” body of her husband, Osiris. Perhaps because of these circumstances (somewhat like the story of Jesus’ conception) Schwaller reasons that the Way of Horus was different from that of his father. The Osirian Way is metaphorically like that of the diligent husbandman on the Earth; the Horus path takes the initiate quickly upward, and so it is symbolized by the swift, steep ascent that a falcon makes, seeming to disappear into the brilliance of the sun before falling on its prey like an arrow from heaven.
In this connection, I recall the words of that fundamental alchemical text, the Emerald Tablet, attributed to the Egyptian sage whom the Greeks called, “Thrice Greatest Hermes” or Trismegistus:

“That which is above
is the same as
that which is below.”

In other words, through recognition of this unified state, the Way of Horus might bring the ability to rise above all dualities through the integration of supramundane influences. Perhaps the Way of Horus was realized through yogic practices such as astral and etheric travel, whereby the consciousness separates from the body for specific purposes of education.

Living yogic traditions, such as Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, emphasize that the mastery of these techniques requires the practitioner to live for more than selfish desires. Some say this is the fruit that comes of integrating what the Jungians call Masculine and Feminine consciousness within a single body, regardless of one’s biology. Initiation with an authentic master, meaning the transmission of knowledge directly from that person, is considered indispensible on this path. We proceed by stages in our spiritual growth, but we cannot truly progress beyond our capacity, which is one way the Universe guards its secrets and insures our safety. On a so-called steep path, as I am imagining the Horus Way because it offers the possibility of liberation from suffering and rebirth during a single lifetime, the dangers include not only egoistic inflation, but also despair when we stumble or tumble. Therefore, the swift flight heavenward requires great care.

* * *

In her discussion of the myth of Isis and Osiris, the American philosopher Jean Houston examines why human beings act so often as if we don’t remember who and what we truly are. Why do we forget the divine king and queen already enthroned in our hearts? Why do human beings dismember our own best works, denigrating their significance? Why do we in a thousand ways discount not only our human worth, but also that of the natural world from which we are inseparable?

Like Schwaller, Houston sees in this behavior the Sethian principle gone awry: a negating force that incites chaos and disorder. This results whenever we hold back from participating in the Maat, or Natural Law, that creates the harmony of the Universe. However, since this constricting impulse seems to be a genuine feature of the human psyche, the presence of Set deserves objective assessment. Ego-centeredness is underpinned by fear and grasping, but it can also be understood as the impulse to insure the safety of an individual organism or of an entire society. Metaphorically speaking, Set represents the inevitable contraction of over-expansive energies. If this force remains unchecked, however, the Sethian impulse to protect ourselves and defend our attachments can be employed to justify many acts of evil, including those perpetrated in the name of “God.”
Distraught as human beings often seem to be, discontented, fragmented or fallen, the Osirian cycle of myths can provide a reminder that we are also capable of transcending fear and selfishness with love. Isis succeeds in re-membering her husband, resurrecting and transforming him into an immortal form, and wicked Brother Set is ultimately rebuked – albeit not without difficulty and not without the intercession of a third force, which is symbolized by the arrival of the winged sun, the avenging hero, Horus Bedheti.

In his interpretation of alchemy, Jung says that the perfection of the Philosopher’s Stone requires a Mysterium Coniunctionis, a mystical union of opposites. The effort might at first appear to suggest a heroic war of good against evil, with the triumph of one member in this supposed binary pair. Freud concluded that the ego could never be completely victorious over the powers of the subconscious mind; and for him, the heroic struggle between them yields the painfully won fruit of consciousness. Jung’s psychology suggests a rather different sort of outcome is possible: reconciliation. This can be accomplished by holding the opposites in relationship, which is what the alchemists and ancient Egyptians also. With such a Mysterium Coniunctionis, or sacred marriage, a third force is manifest, which is both the cause and effect of reconciliation. This is because the psyche, the soul, is whole from the beginning and intends our realization of this wholeness. For one who has this experiential knowledge, the well being of others becomes paramount. Symbolically, this is the activity of Horus and of Jesus, this is the power of the Holy Grail and the Philosopher’s Stone. So it is said that the practice of alchemy – the sacred science of the Black Land, Al Kemi -- helps to complete the work of Nature.

Peter Fortunato received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he held the Randall Jarrell Fellowship in Poetry. His most recent book is Late Morning: New and Selected Poems. He is a Certified Hypnotherapist in private practice in Ithaca, New York. Learn more at www.peterfortunato.wordpress.com