Ritual Purity and You: Part IV
All right...let's do this!
In light of the prior three posts on ritual purity in theory, here is a final post on the topic with a practical set of guidelines for ritual purification for the modern ancient Egyptian religious adherent:
For individuals, on their own, before any ritual:
Body:
- Shower or bath upon waking or after major exertion
- Wash your hands at a minimum otherwise
Mouth:
- At least one of the following:
- Brush your teeth
- Rinse mouth with mouthwash
- Rinse mouth with water with a bit of natron dissolved within
- Chew a tiny bit of natron
Group, beginning of ritual (one or both):
- Sprinkle water on yourself, other attendees, temple, and offerings
- Wave incense around yourself, other attendees, and offerings, then walk around the temple with the incense
As for prayers to accompany these actions, there are a few choices. Temples, statue consecration, and funerary documents have similar utterances for purifying with water, natron and incense, but they are always second person. In other words, the only written purification prayers we find are for someone to say while purifying someone else, usually a statue, a dead person or the Pharaoh or high priest. Modern practicioners usually just convert these to first person, but that shouldn't be necessary. Here is an asperging and censing prayer from Edfu which was used on the high priest presiding:
"It is pure, it is pure.
Your purification is the purification of Horus, and the purification of Horus is your purification.
Your purification is the purification of Geb, and the purification of Geb is your purification.
Your purification is the purification of Thoth, and the purification of Thoth is your purification.
Your purification is the purification of he of the outstretched wings, and the purification of he of the outstretched wings is your purification.
You have received your head; your bones have been gathered for your before Geb. It is Thoth who has gathered them all together in his protection! It was Thoth who gave Horus his eye!" (1)
Another asperging prayer for the temple comes to us from the outer wall, which can be used to purify the temple in general, which can certainly include any people, statues and offerings therein:
"Take the white jar with the flood water to clean Your temple, the jar with rejuvenating water. I bring You Your head, I bring You Your Eyes, I make Your bones divine with Your powers. I am a servant of the God and I sanctify Your image together with the images of the Ennead of Your majesty." (2)
As for self-purification, there aren't any examples for daily temple use. We do have a couple of first-person purifications, from Edfu, in the context of annual festivals: one from the triumph of Horus (for a lector chewing natron), another from the vigil of Osiris in the month of Khoiak (for mourning women representing Osirs' wife Isis and her sister Nepthys, where they chew natron and cense themselves). But these are specific instances, so it should not be mandatory to recite anything specific while bathing or cleaning your mouth.
Postscript: I've seen a number of natron recipes, but the easiest way is to just bake a pan of baking soda for 425F for 20 minutes to turn it into sodium carbonate (removing one carbon atom, basically), then mix it with some unbaked baking soda (maybe 1:6 or 1:4 ratio) and perhaps a bit of salt. Then add water, a bit at a time, while you stir it so it clumps together in small pebble-sized nuggets. Placing them in the refrigerator uncovered can help them dry. Store in a cool, dry place. I use mason jars for long term storage, and a small 4" diameter open terra cotta planting pot for use. Analysis of natron from the wadis shows it occurs with sodium bicarbonate and salt in various levels, so pure sodium carbonate was probably pretty rare, if nonexistent. A single little nugget dropped into a container of water will dissolve within an hour.
(1) Alliot, Maurice (1949) Le culte d'Horus a Edfou au temps des Ptolemees, Imprimerie de l'Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, Cairo, pg. 39-140 (E III 334, 5-7). "He of the outstretched wings" is a form of Horus, replacing prior invocations of Set when he fell out of fashion in the Late Period. Geb is the god of the earth; not nature but the actual earth itself. The use of four deities or repeating something four times was not an uncommon Egyptian liturgical trope. If you want to be really old school, use a white jar with a neck spout (like a soy sauce dispenser) which can be shaken to cast forth drops of water, or tipped to pour libation, doing double duty as a ritual implement.
(2) Exterior wall of the Temple of Horus at Edfu (E VII 202, 11-16), from the Edfu Project Database online at https://adw-goe.de/la/forschung/abgeschlossene-forschungsprojekte/akademienprogramm/edfu-projekt/die-datenbanken-des-edfu-projekts/edfu-datenbank/