Egyptian Reading Notes A

Burial Chamber of Egyptian Queen featuring Ra

The Egyptian readings this week were really interesting, especially after finishing Bible Stories last week! The thing that stood out to me most was the lack of uniformity throughout the Egyptian religion. After reading the Creation Story and several others featuring the sun god Ra I did a little extra research just because I was pretty confused about what role he played in Egyptian religion and I found that only some consider Ra to be the creation god and that later on in Egyptian history he was merged with other popular gods during different times. This struck me as a little odd because I feel like you don't run into that kind of inconsistency in popular religions today. And then I realized that in a lot of ways we do - different denominations of Christianity and Islam for example. Plus those religions had centuries to come up with a standardized book of worship. It really makes you wonder about ancient sub-genres of modern religions that we may never know about.

I also really enjoyed Ra's Secret Name because I feel like this is again something you see in a lot of different cultures. In the story Ra's power comes from his "Secret name" which no one knows - in fact it is never even written down in the story. We see this in everything from traditional religions (many practitioners of Judaism don't invoke the name of God) to Japanese media ("Spirited Away") to common folklore (Rumplestiltskin). It's interesting that so many cultures and religions saw value in names and power as coming from them. Even in the Christian bible people are often given different names after important life events (Saul becomes Paul). Overall my enjoyment of this section of readings stemmed largely from it's parallels with other readings we've done but I'm hopeful I'll get into the stories themselves as I continue!