Our Official Temple Liturgy: Part I

Firing off a missal

The daily ritual performed in the Temple of Horus on the Prairie follows the standard ritual seen throughout ancient Egypt’s history: creating conditions for the divine presence within a cult statue. It involved acting as a valet would to his lord each morning: awakening hymns to the God, cleaning and dressing the statue, and serving it a meal. A similar ceremony is the Hindu puja, where the deity, through the statue, is welcomed as a guest in one’s house and pampered with incense, cleaning and various foods and flowers. In both cases, the idea is to create a reverent space within the temple and the statue so the deity deems it worthy to inhabit. The statue was not considered the God itself.

The following link takes you to the ritual, which is publicly available for your own use or inspiration. It is adapted from Maurice Alliot’s 1949 book “Le Culte d’Horus a Edfou au Temps des Ptolemees”, pages 69-97, with the meal offering prayers taken from the online Edfu Projecct Database, and the final utterance taken from Alliot, pageg 122-123:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0gBysw9xif6GsR7sj7CgC6C0GbqUqbRQqQW3Bd1PYQ/edit?usp=sharing

This post and subsequent ones will provide a step by step analysis of the ritual, starting with the entrance and revelation of the cult statue.

(Approach the shrine) I climb the stairs, I move towards the barque, to see Horus in the barque. My hands are washed, my feet are pure, all my members are sanctified.

Egyptian ritual utterances would often be in the first person, as the priest is declaring his intentions. By placing them in verbal form, they were established as declarative reality in the liturgical context. By writing them on the walls, they were also given a sort of perpetual state of being, performed eternally as long as the image remained. While one can argue that these were simply instructions not to be recited, they are separate from the title describing the action, and were preceded with the phrase “to be said”. In this utterance, the priest is approaching the shrine. He calls its the “barque” (or “bark”) to allude to the solar boat that the sun God sails across the sky, in parallel to the concept of sailing down the Nile river. In this case the deity is Horus, who was equated with the traditional sun God Ra. The priest also declares he has been washed and purified and is thus able to perform the rites. This last sentence is a coda to a prior, more extensive ritual of purification, which we usually omit since it was performed in another part of the temple (the House of the Morning) while or temple is one room.

(Open shrine) You arise on the earth as you come out of the primordial waters! Your rays illuminate the world! Long live the Gods who raise your beauty: they are like your sons, in the horizon of the east!

Before this utterance are two additional actions of removing the clay seal and untying the rope that locked the shrine box holding the statue. We omit these since our statue is life size within a niche (as opposed to a smaller statue as was traditional, which was removed from the box), and the temple door itself is operated by a simple knob. Thus for us the entire temple is a sort of ‘shrine box’.

According to Reginhild Finnestad in her book “Image of the World and Symbol of its Creator”, the revelation of the statue was the penultimate moment of the ritual. The revelation of the symbolic image of the deity within the temple was a sort of epiphany that coincided with the dawning of the solar disk to herald a new day, in turn recalling the creator God’s first emergence at the beginning of time from latent being to fashion the universe. So the just as the solar rays give light, and the creator gives creation, so too does the statue give divine presence to the temple as the world in miniature.

The utterance concludes with the declaration that the other Gods are the children of the creator God (Horus in this case), and that they too “raise his beauty” as helpers. Unlike the prior utterances, this one is in the form of second person, addressing Horus himself, rather than the priest describing his actions.

(Approach and embrace statue) Behold, I approach “The One Who Is Intact”, to see the glorious image of the God with my two eyes, to contemplate the statue of the divine Being, the holy form of Horus the Golden Falcon.

This is another priestly declaration of his actions, as he approaches the statue and lays his hands on it. In the temple vignettes the statue is depicted as life size, whereas in reality it was about two or three feet tall at most. This seems to differentiate the presence of the deity Himself from the statue, and ensures the deity is depicted with proper respect. Touching the statue is an intimate moment, and for one who believes the status is inhabited (literally, symbolically or phenomenologically) by the God, it can impart a profound feeling of gravitas. Far from being distant and aloof, the Gods are also immanent and want to be with us, and this moment is a meeting of the mortal realm and the divine realm.

The phrase “The One Who is Intact” seems to imply that the deity, and its statue, are whole and undamaged, firmly present in the world. This is especially salient with the mythology of the Eye of Horus being lost and restored: the Eye is in its place, and all is well. The priest beholds the deity, through his symbol, with awe in contemplation. At this point, the ritualist may certainly opt to pause in meditation upon the image and the experience of the divine.

(Bow and recite x 4) Just as I praise Your majesty with the choicest words and formulas magnifying Your prestige in Your great names, so You manifest Yourself again as in the First Time.

This is a moment of supplication where the priest bowed and humbled himself before the God. It was done four times, as four was a significant number for repetition in Egypt, likely symbolizing the four directions. The priest also declares that he is praising - and will praise - Horus in all of his epithets. Most importantly, he compares his prayers emerging from his mouth to the emergence of Horus as creator at the origin of the universe, a claim that harkens to the idea of the Logos and our participation in creation, in this case, through truthful speech. It also reinforces the concept of Horus as creator of all things declared when the statue was first revealed.

I am indebted to Dr. David Falk for his updated translation of this particular utterance.

Next time we will delve into the awakening litany and analysis of its verses.