Sacred Geography of Egypt

 Sacred Geography of Egypt 

The sky, the Milky Way, is reflected in the Sacred Nile.

There are three related concepts on different levels or dimensions: Sacred Geography, Sacred Architecture, and Sacred Geometry. 

In all three cases, a territory is defined, a space, and a direct relationship to the agent that defines it. Reduced to its simplest expression, it is the application of a physical or visual form to a more or less extensive territory, and the form applied is nothing more or less than an intelligent idea. 

The potter imagines the object in his mind, which he then shapes in clay. In the same way, the perception of a sacred idea, a heavenly cause, may be reflected in the earth, and it is man with his perceptions of the ideal archetypes who impresses the earth, or the building or temple, which corresponds to that sacred idea.

Khnum, the potter-god, like Jehovah in the Bible, gives the form
 of the body and that of his double, the ka, by means of the potter's wheel
(Canadian Museum of History).

But it is not just the forms of sacred geometry that are involved. For these forms to be alive, they must be related to sacred time, mythological time, or the time that governs the great astrological cycles and the cycles of the gods.

Merjet, an instrument for measuring the stars and their relationship to the sacred site.

The last requirement is that the sacred site or the image of a god or a sacred symbol must be brought to life at a certain time, this is the moment of awakening. The inaugural magical ceremony is therefore essential to activate the sacred place, and then it must be nurtured so that it continues to respond to and reflect the celestial archetype through the seasonal rituals that reaffirm its relationship with the higher.

The sacred place, once active, is the connection, the place that can be accessed to connect with the original models to which it is related, that is, with celestial forces.

To cross to the East is to come to Life, to cross to the West is to go to death, to go North along the river is equivalent to the course of life, to go South to Abydos, the sacred land, is to become immortal, a phoenix:

...Traveling downstream to Busiris as a living soul 

and traveling upstream to Abydos as Bennu (Phoenix).... 

(Book of the Dead, Hymn to Osiris)

In the simple sacred talisman as well as the temple and the tomb, this same concept applies to cities and geographical features and even to the entire country. Each of the established sacred places acts as a Universal Center at the moment of the Sacred Act. In that same act and instant, the Center of Man, the Center of the Priest, the Center of the Temple and of the Sacred City, is the Center in which the entire Universe converges. 

The humid and marshy North
and the parched South are united thanks to Hapi,
the sacred river, represented here by the two figures.

The sacred place is not only the place where the god or the sacred universe manifests itself, it is also the place where the opposites meet, the place where the apparent discordances unite in harmony, hence the importance of sacred geometry that harmonizes the disparate forms, triangles and edges, circles and diagonals, in the same way that the instruments of an orchestra seek orchestral harmony.

Also the prayer of the officiating priest in Egypt, versified, full of strange rhythms and mythological allusions, integrates all the factors present in the sacred moment, and resonates in all the participants bringing to the operative imagination of all the actors present the magical and ceremonial act. We enter then into the sacred time and place, into the divine moment on earth....

...I came here before the cedars existed and the acacias of the Nile 

had sprung up, before the earth produced tamarisks....

Chapter 125 Egyptian Book of the Dead

To be continued