Fresh Batch #148: Isis, Hathor, Sirius, and Other Titular Archetypes

Garnished with Cornish Philology & How to Measure Circumpolar Stars

Most are of the opinion that Isis is a personification of the moon, and there is no doubt that it was, but others and I demonstrated the interchange of names between older meanings and newer ones is a process that happens throughout history, which is why focusing on modern occultism will not give much insight about the ancients.

Lockyer wrote (Dawn. Astr. pp. 194-196.), “Now, it is stated distinctly in the inscriptions that ‘the place of the birth of Isis is to the north-west of the temple of Hathor, its portal is turned to the east, and the sun shines on its portal when it rises to illuminate the world.’ We learn from this that the small temple was locally celebrated as the birthplace of Isis.

“It is, then, a temple of Isis. Who was Isis?

“Let us begin by considering the temple, remarking that the inscriptions, apparently relating to both temples, are found in one only. On this point, I, for the present, content myself with quoting Plutarch’s statement (1st century AD) that Isis and Hathor were the same divinities—at all events, in later Egyptian times.

“If we study the inscriptions—and this, thanks chiefly to Mariette’s magnificent book on Denderah, we can do—we find that they give out a very certain sound. Here is one of them:— ‘She [i.e. her Majesty Isis] shines into her temple on New Year’s Day, and she mingles her light with that of her father Ra on the horizon.’

“Here we have nothing more nor less than a distinct and perfectly accurate statement relating to the cosmical rising of a star, i.e., as I have before explained, of the sun and the star both rising at the same instant of time.

“Everybody knows that ‘Ra’ means the sun, and therefore the rising of Ra is at once accepted by everybody as obviously meaning sunrise. But if we find ‘Hathor’ treated in the same way as the sun, then Hathor must be a celestial body rising like the sun.

“But, further, Hathor was also worshipped, according to the inscriptions, under the name of Sothis.

“Now we know, quite independently of all mythology, that Sothis is simply the Greek form of the Egyptian name (Sept) of the star Sirius.

“Taking, then, all these inscriptions together, we have an absolute astronomical demonstration of the fact that the ‘rising of Hathor,’ which is referred to mythologically in the inscriptions given by Mariette, was the rising of Sirius; that the star which ‘shone into the temple, and which mingled her light of the father Ra,’ was really the star Sirius. We get the demonstration of the fact that mythologically the star Sirius was Hathor, or otherwise Isis.

“In other words, we find a star personified; Sirius being personified as Hathor or Isis.”

All of this supposes the inscriptions are authentic and correctly translated, which I don’t accept (but that doesn’t mean I’m correct); it also supposes the ancients calculated that Sirius rose with the sun in those moments. How would anyone demonstrate that the light of a star belongs to Sirius and not any of the other stars? Lockyer and the other researchers took mighty liberties in arriving at these conclusions, which may be correct, but I’m not convinced yet.

He continued (Ib. p. 196.), “But we can go much further than this. It is possible, as I have shown, to determine the position of Sirius in past times, and therefore to determine whether the light of that star ever did fall along the axis of the temple. We know its orientation approximately—18.5˚ S. of E.—so that any celestial body which rose at that amplitude would shine upon any object enshrined in the sanctuary. In the case of Sirius, the conditions are such that, owing to the precessional movement, the distance of the star from the equator has been gradually lessening from the earliest times. Its declination in 8000 BC was 50˚ S.; it became something more than 17˚ S. in AD 1000.

“Knowing the declination, it is easy to determine the amplitude—and given the conditions at the temple of Isis at Denderah, viz., that we are practically dealing with a sea horizon, we find that the temple really pointed to Sirius about 700 BC, which is the date Biot found for the construction of the zodiac in the temple of Osiris, referred to in Chapter XIII.

“Further, it is easy to show that Sirius at that date rose with the sun on the Egyptian New Year’s Day (Hathor is termed the mistress of the commencement of the year. Mariette, loc. cit., p. 207.); in mythological language, she mingled her light with that of her father Ra on the great day of the year.

“As this is the first instance of such personification that we have come across, it behoves us to study it very carefully. Why was Sirius personified and worshipped?

“The summer solstice—that is, the 20th of June, the longest day—was the most important time of the Egyptian year, as it marked the rise of the all-fertilising Nile. It was really New Year’s Day. It has been pointed out, times without number, that the inscriptions indicate that by far the most important astronomical event in Egyptian history was the rising of the star Sirius at this precise time.”

I’ve asked this question before and I’ll keep asking it: how would they observe the so-called warning-star in a cosmically rising sense, which rises with the sun, for thousands of years without the technology to see through the sun’s effulgence? No one demonstrates this. According to Lockyer, there is “complete evidence that Sirius was not the star first used” for this purpose. He cited Krall (Ib. p. 198.), “Besides the solstice and the beginning of the Nile flood, there was an event in the sky which was too striking not to excite the general attention of the Egyptian priesthood. We also know from the newly-discovered inscriptions from the ancient empire that the risings of Orion and Sirius were already attentively followed and mythologically utilised at the time of the building of the pyramids.”

There is a little too much interpretation and calculation involved for me to accept this as an indisputable fact, but it is worth archiving. These ideas are admittedly according to calculations. I have little doubt that the mathematici can make any of their ideas make sense through equations, but I need much more certitude regarding the inscriptions and archeological findings that they base these ideas off of, and the Greek correspondence to the hieroglyphs leads me to believe the Egyptian inscriptions are not from the several millennia prior to the Common Era as believed.

I expressed my concerns with much of this in A Godsacre for Winds of the Soul, citing Godfrey Higgins, who wrote, “The more Rosetta triplicate stones are found, the more the difficulty will be increased of accounting for the blindness of Clemens and Strabo. M. Champollion was sent to Egypt, by Charles the Tenth, to search for inscriptions, and of course, with the perfect approbation of the Jesuits. He kept up a close correspondence with the well-known Duke de Blancas, Ambassador from France at Rome, and his discoveries, as described by the Marquis Spineto, exhibit, in every part, a predetermination to support the Mosaic system; and this also creeps out from the Marquis perpetually in his Lectures.”

For those interested in learning the ancient universal system of priestcraft and the empire that wielded it, make your way through the Spirit Whirled series and The Real Universal Empire.

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