In the previous post in this series Mystery History Pt3a - The Bird Men - Garuda we looked at Garuda, a mythical Bird Man found predominantly throughout Asia. However we also saw images of Garuda finding their way as far north as Russia.
As stated in the first post, mythical Bird Men are found all over the world so today I am focusing on one from ancient Egypt who is fairly well known in popular culture nowadays, however there is always much more to the story than they teach you in school.
THE BIRD MEN.
EGYPT - HORUS.
The name Horus is a Greek translation taken from the ancient Egyptian name 'Heru' meaning 'the distant one' or 'the one on high'.
Horus for the most part is depicted as a man with the head of a falcon however is he also depicted as solely a falcon with his hieroglyph being a picture of a falcon.
As you will see in the upcoming text, the origin of Horus is fantastical and involves a certain amount of brutality as is often the case in the ancient mythologies!
From Wikipedia .........
Horus was born to the goddess Isis after she retrieved all the dismembered body parts of her murdered husband Osiris, except his penis, which was thrown into the Nile and eaten by a catfish, or sometimes depicted as instead by a crab, and according to Plutarch's account used her magic powers to resurrect Osiris and fashion a golden phallus to conceive her son (older Egyptian accounts have the penis of Osiris surviving).
Once Isis knew she was pregnant with Horus, she fled to the Nile Delta marshlands to hide from her brother Set, who jealously killed Osiris and who she knew would want to kill their son. There Isis bore a divine son, Horus.
Interestingly is has been said that this 'divine' birth may have been the historical seed for the 'divine' birth millenia later of Jesus Christ. This is because the iconography of Horus and his mother was used as a template for the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus by early Christians.
However stealing the iconography of an already established religion is commonplace throughout history and the early Christian Church did it a lot from many different pagan religions. Some have hypothesised the Jesus's story is completely fabricated such are the alleged similarities between Jesus/Horus birth/life stories and the man never really existed, however I find this hypothesis very flimsy and invalid.
Continuing......
Since Horus was said to be the sky, he was considered to also contain the sun and moon. It became said that the sun was his right eye and the moon his left and that they traversed the sky when he, a falcon flew across it. Later, the reason that the moon was not as bright as the sun was explained by a tale, known as The Contendings of Horus and Seth. In this tale, it was said that Set, the patron of Upper Egypt, and Horus, the patron of Lower Egypt, had battled for Egypt brutally, with neither side victorious, until eventually the gods sided with Horus.
As Horus was the ultimate victor he became known as ḥr.w wr "Horus the Great", but more usually translated "Horus the Elder". In the struggle, Set had lost a testicle, explaining why the desert, which Set represented, is infertile. Horus' left eye had also been gouged out, then a new eye was created by part of Khonsu, the moon god, and was replaced.
As I stated earlier, brutal! Chopped off testicles, gouged out eyes, a penis fed to the catfish and a golden dildo, who said history was boring!?
The Eye of Horus is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection and royal power from deities, in this case from Horus or Ra. The symbol is seen on images of Horus' mother, Isis, and on other deities associated with her. In the Egyptian language, the word for this symbol was "wedjat" (wɟt).
It was the eye of one of the earliest of Egyptian deities, Wadjet, who later became associated with Bastet, Mut, and Hathor as well. Wadjet was a solar deity and this symbol began as her all-seeing eye. In early artwork, Hathor is also depicted with this eye. Funerary amulets were often made in the shape of the Eye of Horus. The Wedjat or Eye of Horus is "the central element" of seven "gold, faience, carnelian and lapis lazuli" bracelets found on the mummy of Shoshenq II. The Wedjat "was intended to protect the king [here] in the afterlife" and to ward off evil. Egyptian and Near Eastern sailors would frequently paint the symbol on the bow of their vessel to ensure safe sea travel.
The 'all-seeing eye' is instantly recognisable to many people nowadays as the image has been carried through history to the modern age. It is most famously depicted on the reverse of the United States $1 bill atop a pyramid!
Looking at the note you see the all seeing eye, the pyramid, the eagle (sadly not a falcon) and the inscription 'In God we Trust'.
Which God?
Horus?
To this day there are many hypothesis as to why this image was chosen to adorn the currency of the US however I wonder how many of the conspiracy theorists have looked into the story of Horus when considering the reasons?
Not many I would wager and to be fair neither did I until I started this post.
Its probably unrelated, I just found it interesting that the iconography on this modern currency was closely related to that of Horus, anyway I digress......
Horus was told by his mother, Isis, to protect the people of Egypt from Set, the god of the desert, who had killed Horus' father, Osiris. Horus had many battles with Set, not only to avenge his father, but to choose the rightful ruler of Egypt. In these battles, Horus came to be associated with Lower Egypt, and became its patron.
According to The Contendings of Horus and Seth , Set is depicted as trying to prove his dominance by seducing Horus and then having sexual intercourse with him. However, Horus places his hand between his thighs and catches Set's semen, then subsequently throws it in the river so that he may not be said to have been inseminated by Set. Horus then deliberately spreads his own semen on some lettuce, which was Set's favorite food. After Set had eaten the lettuce, they went to the gods to try to settle the argument over the rule of Egypt. The gods first listened to Set's claim of dominance over Horus, and call his semen forth, but it answered from the river, invalidating his claim. Then, the gods listened to Horus' claim of having dominated Set, and call his semen forth, and it answered from inside Set.
However, Set still refused to relent, and the other gods were getting tired from over eighty years of fighting and challenges. Horus and Set challenged each other to a boat race, where they each raced in a boat made of stone. Horus and Set agreed, and the race started. But Horus had an edge: his boat was made of wood painted to resemble stone, rather than true stone. Set's boat, being made of heavy stone, sank, but Horus' did not. Horus then won the race, and Set stepped down and officially gave Horus the throne of Egypt. After the New Kingdom, Set was still considered lord of the desert and its oases.
In many versions of the story, Horus and Set divide the realm between them. This division can be equated with any of several fundamental dualities that the Egyptians saw in their world. Horus may receive the fertile lands around the Nile, the core of Egyptian civilization, in which case Set takes the barren desert or the foreign lands that are associated with it; Horus may rule the earth while Set dwells in the sky; and each god may take one of the two traditional halves of the country, Upper and Lower Egypt, in which case either god may be connected with either region. Yet in the Memphite Theology, Geb, as judge, first apportions the realm between the claimants and then reverses himself, awarding sole control to Horus. In this peaceable union, Horus and Set are reconciled, and the dualities that they represent have been resolved into a united whole. Through this resolution, order is restored after the tumultuous conflict.
I don't even know where to start with the 'talking semen' part of this story and I always thought lettuce tasted funny so I won't dwell on it. But I do find it interesting how we have the Good V's Evil meme here as it ties into many other historical narratives of an epic battles of Good V's Evil such as Enlil/Enki (Sumerian Tablets), Cain/Able (Book of Genesis), Pandavas/Kauravas (Mahabharata) and
Archangel Michael/Satan (Book of Revelation) to name just a few.
Are these stories all seeded from one originator in deep antiquity?
Or possibly stories passed down by different peoples distributed around the planet but somehow witnessing the same events?
Or are they just coincidentally similar because people in different places at different times come to the same moral conclusions and each decide independently to write their stories of morality into epic battles often with futuristic weaponry?
This feels like a massive stretch to me. However it is what many scholars would have you believe!
Food for thought.
Concluding this article.....
Egyptologists have often tried to connect the conflict between the two gods with political events early in Egypt's history or prehistory. The cases in which the combatants divide the kingdom, and the frequent association of the paired Horus and Set with the union of Upper and Lower Egypt, suggest that the two deities represent some kind of division within the country. Egyptian tradition and archaeological evidence indicate that Egypt was united at the beginning of its history when an Upper Egyptian kingdom, in the south, conquered Lower Egypt in the north. The Upper Egyptian rulers called themselves "followers of Horus", and Horus became the tutelary deity of the unified nation and its kings. Yet Horus and Set cannot be easily equated with the two-halves of the country.
Image Source
Both deities had several cult centers in each region, and Horus is often associated with Lower Egypt and Set with Upper Egypt. Other events may have also affected the myth. Before even Upper Egypt had a single ruler, two of its major cities were Nekhen, in the far south, and Nagada, many miles to the north. The rulers of Nekhen, where Horus was the patron deity, are generally believed to have unified Upper Egypt, including Nagada, under their sway. Set was associated with Nagada, so it is possible that the divine conflict dimly reflects an enmity between the cities in the distant past. Much later, at the end of the Second Dynasty (c. 2890–2686 BCE), Pharaoh Seth-Peribsen used the Set animal to writing his serekh name in place of the falcon hieroglyph representing Horus. His successor Khasekhemwy used both Horus and Set in the writing of his serekh. This evidence has prompted conjecture that the Second Dynasty saw a clash between the followers of the Horus king and the worshippers of Set led by Seth-Peribsen. Khasekhemwy's use of the two animal symbols would then represent the reconciliation of the two factions, as does the resolution of the myth.
The passage of time since Horus was worshipped as a God is huge but his myth still lives on to this day, his images are aplenty in both bird/man and bird form all over Egypt as well as Sudan and Ethiopia.
As with Garuda in the the last post, those who worshipped Horus were of the belief that he was a real entity that had once existed and was divine. Who are we to deny this as myth and fantasy when we have no way to prove that is the case? I'm of the belief that something happened in the very distant past that seeded these Bird Men mythologies, something on a worldwide scale such is the widespread belief in their historical existence. In the next post we will travel across to the America's to see what Bird Men mythologies are to be found on that continent and see if there are any similarities to the stories we have seen so far.
UNTIL NEXT TIME.
