Scarabs: The History, Manufacture and Symbolism of the Scarabæus in Ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, Sardinia, Etruria, etc. — John Shaqi
Scarabs: The History, Manufacture and Symbolism of the Scarabæus in Ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, Sardinia, Etruria, etc.Myer, Isaac
Religion
Scarabs: The History, Manufacture and Symbolism of the Scarabæus in Ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, Sardinia, Etruria, etc.
Myer, Isaac
Egypt -- Religion; Scarabaeus; Symbolism
The rising sun or Horus, in whose arms it was asserted, the dead arose
into the upper life, was represented by the scarabæus under the name
of Khepra, Khepera, or Khepri, this name among its other meanings
signifying: "The itself transforming," and this is hieroglyphically
written by the use of the scarabæus. The body of Khepera as a deity is
surmounted in some of the representations, by a scarab in place of a
human head.
In chapter XXIV. of the Book of the Dead, we read: "Khepra transforms
itself, (or, gives itself a form to itself,) on high, from the thigh
of its mother." This is more fully developed in a papyrus in the
Louvre which reads: "The majesty of this great god attains that reign
(the twelfth division of the subterranean world, responding to the
twelfth hour of the night,) which is the end of absolute darkness. The
birth of this great god, when it became Khepra, took place in that
region * * * It went out from the inferior region. It joined the boat
_mad_. It raised itself above the thighs of Nut."
"O Khepra who created itself on high, from the thigh of its mother,
i.e., Nu, or Nut."[68]
Nut was the goddess personifying the vault of heaven, the sky, and the
space, in which the sun was supposed to have been born. The scarab it
must be remembered was in the Egyptian thought, an androgyne.
In a papyrus now in Turin, Italy, we may read: "I am Khepera, the
morning; Ra, the midday; Tum, the evening." It is said of Khepra as of
Horus, that it produced the _Ma_, i.e., the law or harmony which
uphold the universe, and it is merged with a form of Horus, under the
name of: "Harmakhis-Khepra who gives itself its form." One of the
parts played by Khepra in Ancient Egyptian thought, is condensed in
that figure which we find on the top of some of the Osirian naos's or
arks, the scarab in the middle of the disk emerging from the horizon.
The perpetuity of the transformations or the power to become, whenever
it pleased, the form it desired; was everywhere recalled to the mind
of the people of Ancient Egypt, by the symbolic figure of the scarab,
the hieroglyph of the words: _To become_, _to be_, _to be existing_,
as also creator, an amulet of power above all others. "Khepra in its
bark is Har-em-Khu (or, Harmakhis) himself," (chapter XVII. Book of
the Dead, line 79.) The latter is the sun re-born every day at sunrise
in the East under the name of Horus, it is: "Horus in the horizon,"
the conqueror of darkness. The scarab as Tum-Ra-Khepra is the,
"illuminator of the double earth at its going out of the under-world,
great god, and master of the _Ma_:" that is, of the Harmony and Law,
whereby the universe came into being and exists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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