Printed in the Fall 2019 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Ellis, Normandi ,"Mind over Matter: Magic from Egypt" Quest 107:4, pg 17-21
By Normandi Ellis
When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from the eyes of men.
—Manly P. Hall
Words are magic. Thoughts create actions that manifest forms. No matter what language you use—English, Spanish, Sanskrit, Chinese, or hieroglyphs—thoughts are things, but especially in those languages that combine image, sound, and meaning (intention). Ancient Egyptians knew this to be true. They called their sacred hieroglyphs medju neter (the language of god), and the power of that language they called heka (magic).
Heka contains all potentiality. It is consciousness itself. You already live inside the world of magic at this moment. The late Egyptologist John Anthony West was fond of saying that the ancients would have seen the entire cosmos as one monumental magical act, that is, the manifestation of consciousness as the material world. The ancient Hermetic text known as the Poimandres calls mind “the father of all.” The creation of the world is (because it is ongoing) a mental act.
As a working definition, the ancients knew heka as a prescriptive language that created realities through the exact words uttered at the right time, properly intoned and filled with heady intention. Heka was the alchemical energy of the ancient world, which had its origins in the mystical land of Khem, that is, Egypt; thus, al-khemy meant something derived from the fertile black soil of Egypt. Alchemy and magic are only the “black arts” because they grew to fruition in the fertile black earth, in the same way that sesame and onion grow in the rich alluvial soil of an herbalist’s garden.
Heka, then, is a basic metaphysical concept that our thoughts, how we speak them, and the action that comes from that does in fact create our realities.
Like dream language and poetry, hieroglyphs work on multiple levels, encompassing all levels simultaneously. When words are spoken aloud or written, they become a physical presence—emotionally evocative, resonant thought-forms that linger on the tongue or in memory and acquire new meanings as the images and words repeat. Think of your favorite poem—for me, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” I first heard it when I was in college; I often listened to a recording of it, letting the sounds from the authorial voice of W.B. Yeats drip over me, letting the poem’s images of clay, and wattles, and waters lapping touch me and flow through me. The words of the poem rustle through my mind and sparkle like light on ripples of water. What a lovely poem to hear—a sensory phantasmagoria.
Later, hieroglyphs became another kind of poetry—symbolic and sensory (images), vibratory (sounds), and filled with mythologies (narratives). All three of these intertwine and nestle within the glyph, flowing in and resting there until these words become a living seed inside the reader. Ezra Pound described the three essential ingredients of poetry as phanopeia, melopeia, and logopeia—that is, image, melody, and story respectively. To make full sense of a single word inscribed in the ancient Egyptian language takes an intuitive leap in order to capture all the succulent images, sounds, and narrative references. It requires an even greater leap to read an entire sentence written in hieroglyphs. Single-word equivalents for the hieroglyphs never quite touch their richness.
Hieroglyphic language seems inherently poetical as well as magical; it creates a spell in those who understand it. Inside the corridors of Egyptian tombs, the priestly scribes who copied the ancient texts took the magic into themselves, capturing the symbolism and truths of how the sacred words were used to alter consciousness and thus transform death into life. They understood that in addition to the symbology of the glyphs, the very magical nature of their medju neter was oracular. Inside the hieroglyphic words resonated the voice of god. Ancient scribe-priests interpreted dreams and oracles in the same way that they used the language inside the scrolls, which contained their hymns to the deities or the burial rites for the dead.
What does it mean that thoughts are things? Thoughts are the DNA of the universe, containing the code that gives form to our physical life experience. Without sensation or substance, we could not grasp any thought-form, yet symbols are much more complicated than a simple this equals that picture. The Lascaux cave paintings of cattle, for example, contain a complex series of dots that have been discovered to contain star patterns of the constellations. I recall one in particular that seems to represent the constellation Taurus; its seven spots depict the Pleiades. More than simply meaning “aurochs” (the extinct wild ancestor of the domestic cow) or “I am hunting a spotted ox,” the spots that appear in the painting embed information about the time of year that the herds are likely to travel along a particular path in search of greener pasture. “In the spring when the constellation of the Taurus bull appears in the night sky,” this cave painting says, “Aurochs will migrate through this part of France.” The information that implies is “Yay! We all eat!” This kind of art affords more than quaint Cracker Barrel decor. It offers important recorded information about how to amplify one’s quality of life while simultaneously providing a sense of order and beauty. (It doesn’t surprise me that the ancient Egyptian cow goddess Hathor sometimes bears within her horns seven stars, the so-called Seven Hathors, which represent the Pleiades.)
Symbolic language has been around since the beginning of time. It points to our origins of deepest understanding. It tells a truth hidden in the deep recesses of our memory. The imagery becomes almost second nature. Image conveys meaning. As psychologist Rollo May has said, “What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than art being merely a decoration for our work?” But perhaps symbolic language goes far beyond even that. My friend Cosima Lukashevich, a mixed-media artist steeped in Egyptian culture and the arts, offered an intriguing possibility in a private Facebook message to me. She asked, “Could people (and I am suggesting here both artists and nonartists) use art to draw the world forward?”
My word! She just touched upon the power of heka.
I believe that idea would resonate with the Egyptian scribe who engaged in three-dimensional art, language, and architecture. To the ancient priest-scribes and visual artists, the mantic arts they employed built doorways into the mystery of interlinked science, spirit, and consciousness. Humankind continues to move through these open doorways, now as then, to create new worlds. It becomes entirely possible that the hieroglyphs draw us into transformative states of consciousness these five millennia later, just as the hieroglyphs moved and motivated the ancient mind toward its return to source. We are no longer talking about art as an individual expression of consciousness, or even as a cultural phenomenon; we are talking about the artistic process as consciousness itself—the universal pattern of our human creative DNA.
P.D. Ouspensky, in his book In Search of the Miraculous, quotes G.I. Gurdjieff saying, “Symbols not only transmit knowledge but show the way to it.” In speaking of the symbol of the Seal of Solomon, Gurdjieff went on to say, “The transmission of the meaning of symbols to a man who has not reached an understanding of them in himself is impossible. This sounds like a paradox, but the meaning of a symbol and the disclosure of its essence can only be given to, and can only be understood by, one who, so to speak, already knows what is comprised in this symbol. And a symbol becomes for him a synthesis of his knowledge.”
In her book The Mystical Qabalah, Dion Fortune speaks of how symbol works upon each plane of existence: spiritual, mental, etheric or emotional, until it touches the physical. It blooms in the mind, each association sending out a tendril to touch upon another diverse but associated meaning. She says, “These images are not randomly evolved, but follow along well-defined association-tracks in the Universal Mind.”
Thus it is not possible to say of any hieroglyph that “this” symbol equals “that” meaning. Hieroglyphs and symbols accrue meaning, expanding with endless, interrelated diversity and aspect. A symbol swims in the waters of endless possibility. Those who understand the power of symbol use it as a raft to float from meaning to meaning in a vast ocean of consciousness.
How did this language that is consciousness evolve? In essence, it drips from the Mind of God. More than one Egyptian myth suggests that the thought forms of Ptah, or Atum, or Thoth orchestrated the harmonies of the cosmos. Ptah, an inert being, spits the words of light into being. Atum secretes them into his hand. Thoth enumerates them as vibrations of sound and light, saying, “First, I was one; then I was two; then I was four; then I was eight; and then I was One again.” The deities speak the world into being. John 1:1–3 echoes this idea: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Medju neter in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph meant the “word of god.” The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, a Greek magical text attributed to Thoth, tells us, “That which is below is like that which is above.” All created things originate from this one great thought.
Together Isis and Thoth created the magical, incantatory hieroglyphs, and any high priest, magician, or individual who knew and used them appropriately could command worlds, as did Thoth and Isis. The magical incantations written by Thoth were the laws of ma’at, Truth itself. Forty-two of the most exquisite, powerful hymns and chapters in the Book of the Dead were originally written by Thoth, so the ancients believed, “with his own fingers.”
The Cairo Calendar calls Isis “Provider of the Book.” The ancients believed that the words of Isis “come to pass without fail.” At the Delta city of Busiris she was called “The Great Word” because the incantations from her lips healed the sick, raised the dead, and, with Thoth’s help, stopped time by causing the boat of the sun god Ra to sail backward. Both Isis and Thoth are associated with the wisdom and magic of books. In a hymn to Isis, an aretalogy of the Ptolemaic era, the goddess asserts:
I am Isis, ruler of every land.
I was taught by Hermes (Thoth) and with Hermes devised letters, both hieroglyphic and demotic, that all might not be written with the same.
I gave laws to mankind and ordained what no one can change.
The scribe goddess Seshet, a companion of Thoth, establishes the foundations of temples, records the individual’s life deeds on a notched palm frond, calculates time by the star logs, keeps the library, and manages the Akashic Records. Mentioned as early as the first dynasty of the Old Kingdom, Seshet may be considered an early manifestation of Isis. While Isis was later associated with the star Sirius A, Seshet was associated with the Pleiades; both goddesses are linked to the cow goddess Hathor, the oldest goddess known. A primeval star goddess, Seshet was said to have created the story of the First Time (zep tepi). The scrolls in her library, per ankh or House of Life, contained the rituals and prayers for the daily rites of every deity for every day of the year.
Perhaps we can follow Seshet’s (and Cosima’s) lead by seeing writing and painting as more than a way to communicate, making no distinction between the symbolic and the real. What if the world is nothing but a set of symbols for a higher form of existence? What if our appearance on the canvas of earth was the equivalent of our being living, breathing hieroglyphs for the gods to read and understand?
The first full hieroglyphic religious poetry that we know appears in the disheveled pyramid of the fifth-dynasty pharaoh Unas. These Pyramid Texts, dating from approximately 2460 BCE, provide the earliest religious texts of transformation. They detail the intricate ways of soul resurrection, the shamanic mystery tradition associated with every high priest or pharaoh. The Old Kingdom Pyramid Text may be considered the original prayer book of a soul in translation; it precedes all of the books of the afterlife that followed in the Middle and New Kingdoms, and some of its original hymns were included in those books 2,000 years later.
These hieroglyphs were perfectly executed, ritually infused, and considered holy—meant solely for the eyes and lips of a high initiate of Egyptian magic. These images hold a grammatical lyricism that, in my opinion, makes them the first sacred poetry known to man. A whole philosophy appears within each hieroglyphic image. Chant lines and sound vibrations repeat, the images hypnotically recur, all intending perhaps to induce a trancelike state in the individual, a frame of mind that allows him to mentally slip the physical plane and ascend into the heavens. Thus, riding on this incantatory language, he converses with his ancestors and his Creator. With the image of a goose, its wings outstretched, with the words that resemble the cry of a bird, the text reads: “He rises, he flies. He flies away from you, O men. Body to earth. Soul to sky.”
Not only were the hieroglyphs alive, sprung from the lips of the deity, but the whole world was composed of living hieroglyphs. Every frog, every tamarisk tree, every ripple of water was a living mirror that reflected the divine presence in the world. Divinities, like the things of the world, have their diversities in nature. The ancient Egyptian word for a god or goddess, neter, was understood as “nature,” and the laws of God were the natural laws of the world.
The consciousness of the Creative Intelligence that envisioned hieroglyphic communication operates in thought waves that defy logic. The mind-boggling, symbol-infused reality of hieroglyphic thinking is probably why dreams equally confuse most people, and why most people confound most other people around them, because—when it comes right down to it—we are all likewise diverse and created from that enigmatic Mind of God. That makes each of us perhaps as confounding as walking hieroglyphs.
Taking at face value any language and any religious text (ancient or modern) creates interpretive problems. Mere equivalent thinking (“this for that”) misses the delightful fullness of what is being expressed. Beyond literal meaning, hieroglyphs express thought patterns that are the essence of creative thinking. The deeper truths we crave cannot be found in single-word translations, but must be derived from a core understanding of myth and mythic language. Myth unites the inner world of human experience with the outer world of the universe.
If we look at the example of a single word, we might see how hieroglyphic thinking works. Let’s examine my favorite word, heka. One needs five hieroglyphic signs to write the word for magic; only two of them, H and K, are phonetic. (See illustration.) Yet all of these images work together to create the concepts of divine magical utterance.
The first hieroglyph offers a hard H sound. Most Egyptologists see that hieroglyph as a candle wick of twisted flax fiber. It looks like three crisscrossing loops, or perhaps three circles stacked on top of each other. A single strand of fiber, looped at the top, separates into two ends at the bottom. Actually our roman letter H also implies two strands that meet in the middle, like one rung of a ladder. The Egyptian language used three distinctly different types of H sounds. There is a soft, breathy H—like a sigh or a breeze; a throaty, combined Kh sound that is more frequently used in Middle Eastern languages and in Hebrew; then there is a hard, raspy, explosive H, as if you put your hand over a lit candle flame and said, “HOT!” Potentially, that hard H provides an aural impression of the word for magic.
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| An ancient Egyptian carving depicting the hieroglyphs for heka, meaning magic. The ideograph on the left, a single twisted fiber with three loops, represents H. The central character is ka, written as a pair of arms. The one on the right, a rolled-up scroll, is a determinative indicating that the matter discussed is occult. Image courtesy of Normandi Ellis. |
The visual impression of the candle wick—a single twisted fiber with three loops—reminds us of DNA combining and recombining; DNA is the magic of creation. Certainly it demonstrates separation and reunion, in a fluid motion that is a visual reminder of the natural laws of opposition, of attraction and of unity. This one image projects many metaphysical concepts. For a novice, simply learning the power of these natural laws might seem magical. The image also points to the four planes of existence, the upper loop being the spiritual resting on top of the mental plane, the mental plane above the astral plane, and, finally, the two ends of the string like two legs standing on the earth in the physical plane.
It might also be that magic is a kind of scientific phenomenon that the ancient Egyptians understood. Did they know about the DNA double helix? To the modern mind, that image applies very well to a concept of magic—for what does DNA do? It creates life through the union of separate chemical strands that combine, separate, recombine, twist, and transform into matter. (Rather like the eight beings, male and female, in the cauldron stirred by the god Thoth.)
Plus there is an explosive chemical reaction whose fire quickens and sets the life of the organism in motion. These energetic light codes at the moment of human conception are mirrors of the magic that created Egypt. (Ah! Did you know that when a sperm meets the egg, a spark of light is emitted? True! It’s called zinc fireworks.) Gods made the world by magical means, and shaman priests used that formula to create and alter realities thereafter.
Now between the first hieroglyph, H, and the second hieroglyph, which is ka, we really don’t have a sign for a vowel sound. Standard practice among early Egyptologists was to insert an E in almost every instance where a vowel should be, but wasn’t. Most Arabic, Hebrew, and Near Eastern languages contain a flame letter as part of their alphabets. These marks above the consonants inserted vowels where originally there were none. That breathy part of the word was connected to the breath of god. The true name of the creator god is not to be taken lightly.
The inspiration, or the intake of the breath, and its exhalation creates the spirit of the word. Because the vowel sound is unwritten, that allows for similar words to be implied. The hieroglyph h-ka-t can be seen as another word for a ruler, a chieftain, a pharaoh, or a shaman. It can also be understood as Heket, the frog goddess of transformation who holds the ankh or breath of life to the nose of a child, who is being sculpted by the ram god Khnum on his potter’s wheel. Ancient Egyptian medicine knew that every embryo from chicken to child begins its first stage of life resembling a frog. All life moves from the zygote, subdividing and reuniting until it turns into an embryo that resembles a tadpole. Thus Heket, the goddess of magic and the goddess of creation, holds the ankh, the key of life. Again, we circle back to that idea that something invisible (a vowel) is still a primary part of thought; it is as invisible as a strand of DNA.
Now we encounter a second hieroglyph, ka, written as a pair of arms extended from the chest at right angles with palms up so that the chest opens fully. It is a bilateral sign, which uses one sign for two sounds working together in the same way that “th” or “wh” work. Ka similarly signifies multiple things, depending upon how the hieroglyph is written. It may refer to an animal, specifically a bull, suggesting the magic of creation, insemination, and conception. Apis bulls, or kau, were divine aspects of Osiris, the god of regeneration, and many kau were buried in the Serapeum in Saqqara. All living beings contained the divinity of god. Because meat was often a sacrifice made to the gods, ka was another word for food and for that which nourishes and sustains. When we ingest any living thing, we partake of god, because everything has its source in God. The ingestion and processing of food within the fire of the belly is also an alchemical, magical process.
The hieroglyph ka became a symbol denoting spirit. The energy that inhabits matter and becomes its life force is ka. With both arms open wide to open the chest, the heart cavity opens fully to the divine. Sometimes the ka was viewed as the double of a person or a god. Ka energy connects us to our ancestors, and to life through our desire nature, through our needs to be fed, to be loved and to feel connected to Source and imbued with purpose. Every bit of that is ka energy. Essentially, magic implies a life-giving reciprocity between the human and divine worlds.
We have more hieroglyphs to attach to the word for heka; they are called determinatives. Unvocalized, these images simply connote the flavor of the hieroglyphs that precede them. The determinative we find here is a rolled-up scroll tied with string, which implied that whatever text lay inside that papyrus was occult, that is, being hidden from view. In other words, magical knowledge was not for everyone to know. In the wrong hands, heka could be misunderstood or misused with as much devastation as plutonium. The natural laws behind the phenomenon of magic were powerful and inalterable—not easily understood by all, and, sadly, sometimes used to harm. A priest scribe had an ethical responsibility to preserve the mystery. Many stories say this was not always done, so magic and sacred ritual need to be preserved to prevent their misuse. For this reason, most sacred scrolls were kept in a temple library and not in the home or workplace. A separate script, hieratic, was used as the everyday shorthand of the hieroglyphs.
In some versions of the word, a final hieroglyph (not visible in this image) might depict three seeds. Three of anything indicated multiples thereof, which is why the divine families appear in clusters of threes—i.e., Isis, Osiris, and Horus, even the three sun gods Khepera, Ra, and Atum. The seeds represented multiple ways of making and creating magic. It also implied multiple outcomes with innumerable intentions. This idea of multiplicity carries with it a responsibility. In other words, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” The seeds not only represent the idea of producing a harvest generation after generation, but remind us to take care in our planting and magic making.
Normandi Ellis’s books on ancient Egypt include Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead; Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness; and Dreams of Isis: A Woman’s Spiritual Sojourn. Her next book, Hieroglyphic Thinking: Words of Power, will be published by Bear & Company in May 2020.