Reddit mentions of Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many

That tattoo is of "Ouroboros." It is an incredibly telling detail, as it comes from Egyptian iconography depicting a serpent consuming itself.

This book covers the "Ouroboros" in precise detail (book link here: https://www.amazon.com/Conceptions-God-Ancient-Egypt-Many/dp/0801483840) about Ouroboros representing the amorphous disorder that perforates and envelops our "orderly" world and, in a perverted twist of duality, also represents the perpetual renewal of our world. How? It is built upon consuming ourselves through self-destruction and how that happens in a dynamic variety of ways, manners, and forms.

BONUS: Lena says to her class...

>"The cell we're looking at is from a tumor. Female patient, early thirties, taken from the cervix. Over the course of the next term, we will be closely examining cancer cells in-vitro and discussing autophagic activity."

The term "autophagy" comes from the Ancient Greek "αὐτόφαγος/autóphagos", which translates to "self-devouring." What else have we discussed that self-devours? An interesting question, but I slightly digress.

This is not to imply that the Egyptians knew of other worlds or life forms. It's to imply this self-consuming infinite cycle is unbreakable and almost feels tangible when looking at the world from a certain angle.

And looking from a certain angle is this film. It's an intrinsic and tangible portion of us (cancer, failed relationship, a daughter's passing and the blame shouldered, a woman seeking to fill an existential void...) and our unique self-destruction that the aliens are replicating at their peak function. It's why the Bear is screaming in Sheppard's voice. It captured her final cries from her voice box, as opposed to her brain. This choice is intentional. It demonstrates that our tendency to existentially implode is hard-wired in an almost hereditary manner.

Everyone shares some tragedy or internal crisis that propels us toward our own annihilation. We struggle to feel worthy of existence itself and that is so strong, it is passed onto a life-form capable of manifesting it with literal and objective corporeality.

In the very end, bullets cannot challenge the adapting creature's existence because it is mimicking humanity. It only falls after it takes it's own life and it's own submissive existence is forced to expunge itself unto Lena. It tries aggressively and cannot succeed. It only succeeds when it gives into it's own destruction and "perfectly adapts", so to speak.

To summarize? It essentially adapts flawlessly, as it is a clearly advanced species, but it adapts to a part of our humanity, which can only be expressed with physical distinction, that is the absolute worst flaw.

>Ventress: Then, as a psychologist, I'd say you're confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide... and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives, we drink, or we smoke. We destabilize the good job. Or the happy marriage. These aren't decisions, they're... they're impulses. In fact, you're probably better equipped to explain this than I am.

>Lena: What does that mean?

>Ventress, after scoffing: You're a biologist. Isn't self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?

The sound of a loud, brief, and sharp interruption is heard in the distance...

>Lena: What was that?

>Ventress: Don't know.

Look at the answers from anyone potentially influenced by the Alien. They offer that they "don't know" or show doubt when discussing what has happened, from a soldier to a qualified biologist. Is Ventress? I don't know but her understanding leads to the alien coming closer to the realization that self-destruction is humanity's strongest internal (and perhaps repressed) drive so it takes several transfers, duplications, and even assimilation to finally reach this conclusion and it profoundly changes the alien and normalizes it into the human hierarchy. It has adapted to our instinctual low-humming of how we must expire with finality to inch forward to do it once more.

The alien effectively becomes a living, breathing, and physically existing manifestation of self-destruction. The movie argues that perhaps we are as well, which is why everything is normal at the end (When Kane and Lena reunite and are totally unsure of their own identities) except for "shimmers" (yeah, heard "shimmer" before?) in the eyes of both Kane and Lena. We, as people, "don't know" because Lena encounters a mimicking shadow of ourselves that refuses to let her leave even though it mimics her. No, not mimics her... It's her self-defeating effigy. That instinct to collapse within ourselves comes full circle and the serpent eats once more.

Amor fati, my friend. Just my two cents.

BONUS: Absolutely enormous allegorical moment when Lena reads The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks within the film in a flashback. A hint is "HeLa cells." ;)

> 1.) How are the gods viewed? Extra-dimensional beings, intelligences of natural forces or something else? Are they part of our world or another one?

These small questions demand exhaustive responses, haha. It's difficult for me to condense it here, but I will try, and will more than likely end up elaborating in comments later on.

The Netjeru are viewed as Gods -- Gods with multifarious and complex natures. They're not archetypes. They're not mere "metaphors" for anything, and are by no means facile explanations for natural phenomena conconcted by "pre-rational" humans, as many Moderns who privilege promissory materialist philosophy and interpretations are so fond of and known to say.

Personification-deities -- like Ma'at, the embodiment of the concept of ma'at; Sia, the embodiment of Divine intellect, perception, prophecy, etc.; and Shai(t), the God Who manifests more often as male than as female, and embodies fate, destiny, prophecy, etc. -- are still literal Divine beings as all the rest, but are not ones which are personable and personally accessible to human beings, on human terms. Some are much more "humanly accessible" than others. There are many classes of deities, with many roles and functions each performs, both on an individual basis and as units.

Fair warning: One does not get very far with two-dimensional interpretations and approaches to Egyptian religion(s). Ancient Egyptian theo-logic is incredibly polyvalent, and is not comprised of nor dictated by a series of competitive and contradictory bivalent values.

Arguably, the majority of the Netjeru are both immanent (within the world) and transcendent (above/outside the material world but still affecting it). That said, there are Gods that specifically dwell in the Duat (the Unseen), and do not manifest in the Seen (the material world which we inhabit). These obscure legions of specialized Divinities and "demons" are primarily but not exclusively encountered in funerary religious material, including but not limited to the Books of the Earth.

We must account for differences between localities and time periods, too . . . there is simply no simple, short, sweet answer (or set(s) of answers) to such questions, I'm afraid. Nor should there be, for a religion (or rather, series of religions) so old and multiplex as those of Ancient Egypt.

>2.) What should I read first? Should I study the myths or read a 101 book?

>3.) What specific books do you recommend?

There is no one book, nor only a couple of "handy manuals," that will inform you even remotely satisfactorily on Ancient Egyptian religion(s) and/or ritual mechanics. Anything that focuses solely on "myth," as per the nature of the discipline of "Mythology" (which is the study of myth as literature, frequently to the exclusion of cultural and religious context, and without regard for the fact that not all myth corresponds to ritual, or vice versa), will inevitably be inadequate and piecemeal.

The easiest place for me to start is to advise you whose works to avoid. Rosemary Clark, E. A. Wallis Budge, Judith Page, Normandi Ellis, Jeremy Naydler, and Jocelyn Almond are among those on the "Do Not Read" list. They're all rife with interpretative and methodological faux pas and plain-old factual historical inaccuracies.

The not-so-easy place for me to go from there is whose I recommend. There are too many scholars and texts to recommend, and my advice and recommendations are most definitely colored by my formal education in Philo/Theo and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. There are some articles I would recommend before out-and-out textbooks, but I realize that not many people have ready access to them as I do.

Anyway, even the best "Western" scholars, such a Jan Assmann and John Baines and Dimitri Meeks and Stephen Quirke, have their own interpretative problems embedded in their best pieces of writing. That said, Stephen Quirke probably has the best (not to mention the most recent) introductory, survey text on Ancient Egyptian religion(s) to date. I absolutely do not recommend Garry Shaw's, which was published last year, for all his privileging of Modernity over "pre-rational" Ancient non-Greeks and refusal to view Egyptian religious material as anything other than "poor explanations of the physical world for people without recourse to particle physics" (paraphrasing, though "for people without recourse to particle physics" are among his exact words). Nor does Shaw say anything different or better than other scholars like Meeks and Assmann and Baines have already said years earlier, elsewhere.

Erik Hornung's Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt : The One and the Many is one of the most important books on the nature of Egyptian religion(s). While I have some issues with it, I highly advise people curious about Egyptian religion(s) read that text in particular. Definitely plan to read that one, and read it slowly and carefully. Many Modern Kemetics who have read it didn't particularly understand the material for whatever reasons, which I highly suspect had to do with, in no small part, speed-reading and no time taken for critical reflection.

Maulana Karenga composed the most extensive -- not to mention, fair -- study on the Egyptian concept of ma'at to date. He does a good job of pointing out some problems in other scholars' attempts at unpacking the issue over the last several decades, and he does a good job outlining what, precisely, ma'at entails morally-ethically through extensive analyses of diverse bodies of textual evidence from different periods of Pharaonic history. Ma'at, in case you and/or those reading don't already know, is the underpinning of the entire religion(s) and Kemetic worldview, and it's impossible to be a Kemetic without understanding what ma'at is, and making it the foremost part of one's daily life and the foremost goal of one's life.

Robert K. Ritner and Geraldine Pinch wrote texts addressing heka -- Ritner's are considered to be among the best, while Pinch's are considered adequate (she makes glaring citation mistakes in areas, for instance, i.e. in the sections she writes concerning the Seven Hathors. No spell in primary source material, from any period, exists where They perform as Pinch states They perform, on top of her not providing citation for what text she (mis)interpreted those sections from). J. F. Borghouts' Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts, although brief, is frequently cited and worth looking at. A PDF of it should be floating around the interwebs somewhere, if you're interested in that, since it's pretty expensive to acquire physical copies of and is, to my knowledge, since out of print.

James P. Allen's, Thomas G. Allen's, and Raymond O. Faulkner's translations of the most famous funerary texts are among the best. Adriaan De Buck's translations of the Coffin Texts are considered authoritative, but are considerably difficult -- especially for those outside Academia -- to gain access to. I should note that the funerary texts are only so important. They honestly do not play a major role in Modern Kemetic practice and belief, though Modern Kemetics do by no means totally ignore them. Important to know, not much practical use, in other words.

As for Modern Kemetic works . . . nnnnot many exist which I could recommend in good conscience. The late Richard Reidy's Eternal Egypt is much acclaimed by many Modern Kemetics, though it does contain some errors. That's not to say that it's utterly useless, only that some of the rituals contained therein (such as those pertaining to Sekhmet) are predicated on erroneous information and mistaken interpretations. Tamara Siuda's Ancient Egyptian Prayerbook is, admittedly, only particularly handy if you're looking into becoming part of the Kemetic Orthodox Temple. It contains pointers on how to erect and dedicate shrines (in the Kemetic Orthodox way, that is); how to perform the Kemetic Orthodox rite of senut; "how to pray" and prayers in English; and snippets of introductory information about some of the most important Egyptian deities. Nothing super-heavy.

I hope this helps; and apologies for the length of my response.

With all due respect to those who've suggested so, E.A. Wallis Budge is a terrible place to start regarding the Egyptian religion. His work (being more than a century old) is outdated, his theories are biased, and his translations are seldom (if ever) used in academic Egyptology today.

The only reason so many people still turn to Budge's work is that it belongs to the public domain, and can therefore be printed royalty-free.

Better works to consult are:

- Religion in Ancient Egypt by Various Authors
- Ancient Egyptian Religion by Stephen Quirke
- Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt by Erik Hornung
- The Search for God in Ancient Egypt by Jan Assmann
- Ancient Egyptian Magic by Geraldine Pinch

If you're looking for translations of texts, try:

- Various Translations by RO Faulkner

If you're interested in the language, try:

- The VYGUS Dictionary
- The Demotic Dictionary
- The Middle Egyptian Dictionary

Much of this material isn't available for free, but that's because modern Egyptology is a career, and those who continue to enlighten us regarding the beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians shouldn't be expected to do so while living in squalor.