Crowley, it seems, tried as much as possible to use the original Egyptian pronunciations of divine names, rather than use their popular Greek corruptions. Some of these (e.g. Hadit) have since been revised in the light of better knowledge of Egyptian, but his attempt was in general a good one.
* Was there any Egyptian gematria?
Put simply, no. If there was a standard order used by the Egyptians for their alphabet, it has been lost. And unlike Hebrew, but like English, the symbols used to express numbers in Ancient Egyptian were not used for letters.
However, since the phonetics of Egyptian closely parallel Hebrew, it is possible to transliterate Egyptian names and phrases into the Hebrew alphabet for gematric computations much more readily than English.
* What's the deal with all these 'hyphenated' gods like Amen-Ra, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, Ptah-Seker-Ausar, etc.?
Most hyphenated gods' names are explained thusly:
In ancient Egypt, different cities often had completely different conceptions of cosmology. As the influence of a city grew, so often did the influence of its mythos. It became necessary to reconcile different gods who served similar roles, and so the priests took the enlightened viewpoint that the "gods" were merely one entity manifesting under different names and/or forms. The one entity was referred to by a compound name, such as Amen-Ra or Ptah-Seker-Ausar.
However, some hyphenated gods' names are merely hyphenated to make them easier to read, for example, Her-nedj-tef-f, from the Egyptian words Her "Horus", nedj "avenger", tef "father", and -f "his", thus "Horus, the avenger of his father."
In the case of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, we have both explanations in force: Ra "Ra", Hoor "Horus", khuit "of the horizons", thus "Ra, who is like Horus of the Horizons".
Keywords: greek goddesses artemis moon being called deity rawhead bloody goddess hecate charge horned greek erebus song goddess wicca wholesale wizard spells spellsandmagic garden vision witchcraft school
This entry was posted
on 7 February 2010
at Sunday, February 07, 2010
. You can follow any responses to this entry through the
.