“It was a blood-curdling discovery. The mummy of a young man with his hands and feed bound, his face contorted in an eternal scream of pain. But who was he and how did he die? On a scorching hot day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of the 40 kings and queens found a few years earlier in an astonishing hidden cache near the Valley of the Kings.

The 1881 discovery of the tombs, in the Deir El Bahri valley, 300 miles south of Cairo, had been astonishing and plentiful. Hidden from the world for centuries were some of the great Egyptian pharaohs – Rameses the Great, Seti I and Tuthmosis III. Yet this body, buried alongside them, was different, entombed inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased’s identity.
It was an unexpected puzzle and, once the coffin was opened, Maspero found himself even more shocked.”

(via The Daily Mail)

“Occultscience.tv immediately greets the visitor with a hieroglyphic at the top of the page known as The Great Ennead, which symbolizes Creation (Atum-Ra to Auset). With this powerful symbol comes the words that every beginner in the study of the occult sciences first encounters on their glorious journey, “Know Thy Self”. Words of wisdom that lets the viewer know that they are about to enter a world of knowledge and information that they may not be familiar with, but a fascinating one nevertheless.

[..] Ancient Khemet is the site’s theme, a plethora of links, videos and blogs takes the viewer through a variety of occult/esoteric information. The content presented is intended to guide the viewer far away from conventional religious thought and study to a path of self knowledge and empowerment. As one progresses through the site, one is lead to ask “why”?, why has this knowledge been hidden? for what purpose? and why has this sacred knowledge not been taught in our educational institutions? To find the answers to such probing questions, one must be willing to challenge one’s current paradigm, to question all that one has been taught to think and believe.”

(via PR.com. Thanks DJ!)

(Occultscience.tv)

“The Pyramid Texts Online website has had a major update with the addition of the Library. Sit down and relax with an old classic, flick through the pages on-screen thanks to the Internet Archive’s Flip Book. Due to the antique age of most of these books it is best to use something more current for study purposes but these old books are an enjoyable look back at the past thoughts of earlier writers.

There are also links to other online books, articles and also a paprii section which includes Papyrii.info, a search engine of papyrological resources called the Papyrological Navigator. Other pages were also updated and the Tools page now has some new additions and Mark Vyges’ Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary has just been updated this week.”

(via Talking Pyramids. h/t: Egyptology News.)

(Mark Vyges’ Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary via Egyptology News)

“As the main deity of the funerary cult, Osiris is shown as a mummy wearing the crown and holding the crook and flail as his royal insignia. But why is the god portrayed as a human being?

As is well known, anthropomorphy is a trait shared with all prominent members of the ancient Egyptian pantheon, often in combination with animal features. Likewise, ancient civilisations such as the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Greeks, the Persians, the Indians, the Chinese and the Aztec all widely painted, sculpted and described gods and goddesses in terms of human beings. This raises the question to what extent members of these cultures actually envisioned their gods as humans?

Euhemerus of Messene (4th century BCE) was a Greek mythographer credited with the view that the supernatural tales and characters featured in mythology were really exaggerations of mundane historical events. While his work has not withstood the ravages of time, various classical writers of the Imperial period reflected the opinion that the gods were really just extraordinary human beings.”

(via Thunderbolts. H/T: The Anomalist)

“This is an educational web site that aims to provide the viewer with the elements of archaeological work, including the progress of excavation. The daily results are crucial to an understanding of how field investigation takes place, since decisions must be made on the basis of ongoing work. The people involved in the work are also an essential feature and contribute profoundly to the final outcomes. The focus of our diary is thus often on the people and their activities.

In January 2008, Dr. Betsy Bryan once more traveled to Egypt with students. Work at the temple of Mut began later than usual, however, as Dr. Bryan first led fifteen undergraduate and three graduate students on a study tour of Egypt. This intensive intersession course included sites rarely visited in recent years due to result of convoy traffic that moves non-Egyptians at certain times of the day, and only allows stops at a few and unvarying archaeological sites.”

(Hopkins in Egypt Today via Alternative Approaches)

According to the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, actor Wesley Snipes was “found not guilty of federal tax-fraud and conspiracy charges Friday, but was convicted on three misdemeanor counts of failing to file a tax return”. Looking into this a bit further, I found an article which states that he “appears to have associated himself with not one but two radical extremist groups, each with a long history of criminal activity. In addition to being advised by Eddie Ray Kahn (pronounced “Kane”), an IRS antagonist since 2000, Snipes appears to own a fraudulent trust of the sort that recently earned anti-tax activist Arthur Farnsworth a conviction for tax evasion (he is scheduled to be sentenced in Pennsylvania later this month). It’s not the best company to be keeping if one seeks to maintain good standing with the U.S. government. But what makes the case truly bizarre is the anti-tax movement’s deep association with anti-Semites and white supremacists.”

It is also rumored that he has ties to a “bizarre Georgia-based black nationalist cult, the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors-an apocalyptic organization that preaches a ripped-from-the-X Files m?lange of UFO lore, Egyptian mythology, Afrocentrism, and conspiracy theory. The group is led by self-styled prophet Dwight “Malachi” York, who in 2004 was sentenced to 135 years in prison for a litany of convictions including tax evasion and the sexual abuse of more than a dozen children of his disciples.”

How did he become associated with two different groups with radically different views? They found something in common. The anti-tax movement.

(via Radar)

“Ancient Kemetic (Egyptian) medicine was incredibly advanced. The Ancient Kemetic People were probably the first people in the world to have based their knowledge off of careful and astute observations, as well as trial and error. By careful observation, early doctors or physician priests of ancient Kemet began healing practices that were world renowned. Theirs was a medical system that was developed over three thousand years and gave much toward the advancement of medical science worldwide, and any monarch or noble to have an Egyptian physician in their employ was a mark of high status. There was not the exact separation of Physician, Priest and Magician in Ancient Kemet that we think of today. Many times there was crossover from one “specialty” into that of another. An example of this would be that i would not be considerd at all unusual in antiquity for a patient to receive treatment for a dog bite, for example, whereby this would be bandaged up with a paste of berries and honey and an incantation would be given to the patient to be said over the wound. He or she might recieve it written on a piece of papyrus as well and choose to wear it as a type of magical amulet. Magic however was not always a part of the healing arts. Many scholars think that the Ancient Kemetic People were overly superstitious and thought that all injury and illness was caused by “demons” or curses. This definitely was not the case.”

(Ancient Egyptian Medicine via The Ancient Egyptian Virtual Temple)

“In a potential blow to themed resorts from Vegas to Tokyo, Egypt is to pass a law requiring payment of royalties whenever its ancient monuments, from the pyramids to the sphinx, are reproduced. Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told AFP on Tuesday that the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country’s thousands of pharaonic sites.

“The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of historic Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100-percent copies,” he said. “If the law is passed then it will be applied in all countries of the world so that we can protect our interests,” Hawass said. He said that a ministerial committee had already agreed on the law which should be passed in the next parliamentary session, while insisting the move would not hurt Egyptian artisans.”

(via AFP and BBC News)

“Welcome to Eternal Egypt, which brings to light over five thousand years of Egyptian civilization. Eternal Egypt is a living record of a land rich in art and history, people and places, myths and religions. The stories of Eternal Egypt are told using the latest interactive technologies, high-resolution imagery, animations, virtual environments, remote cameras, three-dimensional models and more.

There are many ways to begin your journey through Eternal Egypt. The guided tour is a quick way to experience the best that the site has to offer. You can also begin with one of the cultural highlights below, or make your own discoveries using one of the many other ways to explore.”

Eternal Egypt virtual tour

a French architect says that after studying the pyramids for eight years, he has solved the mystery with the help of 3-D computer animation.

Jean Pierre Houdin believes the pyramids were built from the inside out, through an internal spiral ramp.

“This is completely new. Everyone [before] me thought that the pyramid was built from the outside, only the outside,” Houdin said.

Full Story: ABC News.

The Egyptian authorities have given the go ahead for the underwater exploration of what appears to be a Roman city submerged in the Mediterranean, Egypt’s top archaeologist said on Monday.

Full Story: Reuters.

OK, after my embarrassing posting of this article comes a (I think) legit new gospel discovery:

National Geographic unveiled an ancient manuscript Thursday that may shed new light on the relationship between Jesus and Judas, the disciple who betrayed him.

The papyrus manuscript was written probably around 300 A.D. in Coptic script, a copy of an earlier Greek manuscript.

It was discovered in the desert in Egypt in the 1970s and has now been authenticated by carbon dating and studied and translated by biblical scholars, National Geographic announced.

Unlike the four gospels in the Bible, this text indicates that Judas betrayed Jesus at Jesus’ request.

Full Story: CNN.

More: NPR.

(thanks to Dale and Bill who sent word of this story almost simultaneously).

So this is actually a year old, but this is the first I remember hearing of it:

In what may eventually prove to be a serious challenge to traditional Christian ideas of the life of Jesus, scholars at Oxford University announced Tuesday the discovery of a previously unknown Gospel fragment among a collection of ancient Egyptian papyri. The single papyrus sheet was found among the collection known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a horde of ancient texts uncovered in Egypt in the last century. The fragment contains dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and the words spoken suggest something that can only come as a shock to mainstream Christians: that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife.

Full Story: Liverpool Observer on necessaryprose.com.

(via Vortex Egg).

Update:

See what happens when you post things without reading them first? Here’s the passage in question:

“I expected more from you,” she said. “This is not worthy of me. It is not worthy of us.”

“Worthy of you?” he replied, stepping over to the balustrade and looking out over the moonlight dancing on the Aegean. “If it weren’t for me…” But he didn’t finish the sentence.

“It’s true you saved me,” she said. “But still. These places we stay in. And this food. This was to be our honeymoon.”

“I suppose you think I’m not good enough for you then,” he answered, turning back to her.

There was a bitterness in his tone she’d never heard before. She saw the anger flash in his dark eyes as it did when he spoke of the Pharisees.

“Just a carpenter’s son from Galilee,” he went on. “Not quite worthy of Mary of Magdala. I suppose you’d rather be with those seven devils I drove from you.”

“Yes, sometimes,” she said, taking up the challenge. “Sometimes I miss the devils. At least they had a sense of humor. At least they wouldn’t mix their honeymoon with business. At least with the devils I’d–”

“You can go straight back to them!” he said, cutting her short. “I have come to do my Father’s work, and those who are not willing….” [here the text breaks]

And the story date… April. Oh well.

Ancient war goddess statues unearthed in Egypt.

Granite head of a king with Nubian features discovered.

Archaeologists have discovered an intact, ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the first since King Tutankhamun’s was found in 1922.

A University of Memphis-led team found the previously unknown tomb complete with sarcophagi and five mummies.

Full Story: BBC.

(via Vortex Egg).

Metachor’s back from Egypt, and has posted some intersting new links.

Vortex Egg.

Though it only just launched in March of this year, the Book of Thoth site has gotten something of an overhaul, and now features more conspiratorial content in addition to the usual stuff on Egypt, Magick, and the Tarot:

ThothWeb remains the only site on the internet to exclusively publish never before translated Egyptian texts including the 5,000 year old ?Alchemy of the Soul? which is one of the few texts to survive the destruction of pagan texts by the Roman church almost 2,000 years ago.

The site also has exclusive transcriptions over 140 UFO press clippings that had made headline news over a fifty-year period, from the Foo Fighters, Roswell and beyond. Thothweb has also collated some of the most amazing UFO quotations ever made, straight from the lips of presidents, the military and the government, providing a unique resource for all UFO researchers.

Sadly, the gentleman in charge of Fixed Earth dot Calm has not kept his domain payments current and you can’t get a look at the marvelous insanity that formed the site a mere two days ago. However, my friend Ben informed me that many of the forces behind “intelligent design” or whatever the fuck have also been taking further steps backward in scientific progress. Specifically, a new assault on “heliocentrism” (more on this later) seems underway. Put simply; the Christers don’t believe that the Earth moves at all, as a number of references to “fixed earth” appear in the Bible.

The part that sent a chill down my spine read something like “the world is one ten trillionth the size science thinks it is!” in large font with lots of exclamation points. What disturbs me about this involves some Howard Bloom-style psychobiology. On the Disinfo DVD Howard discusses a movement back into the darker recesses of the human mind- specifically the limbic functions of “fight or flight”, etc. which result in a return to the Dark Ages. Altho this dark ages would inevitably contain far more atrocities than the previous dark ages. The Westboro Baptist Church and this idea of “fixed earth” forms the template for the Future Dark Age.

However, I keep going back to the phrase above. It seems a strange re-formulation of pre-scientific cosmologies- those of the Sumerians, Egypt, etc. While such cosmologies work for the Illuminated they necessarily limit human psychogeography and in an extreme fashion. Never forget that some exist who seek to limit human psychogeography back at a pre-historic level. As occultists, revolutionaries and scientists, we must never forget the gigantic leap backward offered by such forces.

Hey Dad, am I even allowed to post this?

The origins of Freemasonry ? as would be expected of such a ?venerable secret society? ? are shrouded in myth, legend and almost impenetrable obscurity. Since at least the late 18th century Masonic writers have sought to establish a link between the Knights Templar and the Freemasons. Freemasonic lore and symbols have been traced to ancient Egypt and Phoenicia. Yet, despite all the books and articles exploring Freemasonry published over the last hundred years, there is one area that has not received attention. It concerns Freemasonry?s debt to Islamic mysticism and a shadowy tradition connecting the Masons with the Moors of North Africa.

Link. (Via Dr. Hyatt)

When I Am King, the online comic by Swiss artist Demian5, follows a sexually deviant camel and the recently de-pantsed king of Egypt on a quest to find love and trousers. The story is told entirely through pictures and symbols — without a word of text. It’s a wild ride through a desert that includes weird sex, hallucinogenic drugs and dangerous bees.

“About ninety-five percent of [When I am King] I made up as I went along,” Demian5 says. “Some scenes, like the one where the ‘camel’ smokes the cigarette, were in my head before I even started drawing WIAK.”

WIAK reads like a textbook example from Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. The whole comic was created and published electronically — Demian didn’t take any notes or do any sketches on paper. He used mostly Adobe programs Photoshop, Illustrator and ImageReady to draw the comic and create animation. He freed himself of the restrictions imposed by printed page dimensions and used the web’s “infinite canvas” to convey a sense of space. The reader mostly scrolls left to right, following the characters activity along the landscape, but in a few scenes the reader scrolls down, following falling characters. Animation is used to highlight emotions and convey a sense of motion rather than as a storytelling tool. In fact, WIAK deals more with emotions and experimentation than plot. The story in WIAK is only background — what’s really important is what the characters are feeling and how it’s expressed to the audience.

Demian’s new project, Square Stories, is published weekly in the print version of Zurich Express and will also be published online in America. Demian says he finds Square Stories confining “mostly because of its small, weekly-one-gag form. I’m still trying to find the perfect way to do them. Contrary to WIAK it will also contain words sooner or later, and as it is published in a very widespread official newspaper it is aimed at a larger, more average audience. It is also forbidden for me to offend real people and to offend religious feelings.” He adds, “I wonder if I will ever have trouble with that.”

Although the strips look much like Demian’s other work, hiring Demian to work for a mainstream newspaper is like hiring David Lynch to take over Peanuts. WIAK features a camel performing sexual favors for humans. But Demian, a self-described “poorly disciplined vegetarian” defends his work saying “I don’t want anyone to do anything with animals, just be friends with them. There is also a symbolic aspect to the sodomy parts of WIAK. It is not sodomy because the creatures in WIAK are neither really human nor are they real animals — they all have about the same amount of intelligence, and they don’t really exist. They’re just symbols. Glyphs.” (“I wasn’t planning to do so much symbolism when I started WIAK,” he admits.) He adds, “It’s not about animal rights, though I think we should care about them.”

When Demian5 began serializing the comic on his site in 2000 it was an immediate hit, even without much advertising. “I submitted my link to some search engines and I contacted a few other comic creators like Scott McCloud to find out what they think about my work,” he says. By the time the series reached its conclusion Demian was being mentioned alongside comics legends like Jim Woodring and Chris Ware, and has since been favorably reviewed in Wired and Spin. According to Demian’s “complicated system of counters” nearly 50,000 people have read his comic so far.

Despite the popularity and critical success of his comic, Demian is still not able to live off it. PayPal donations and merchandise sales help him out, but they’re not paying his rent yet. Demian admits he would be content working a day job and continuing to post his comics online if he had a job he enjoyed. “Somehow I like the spirit of free online comics, because money is always a threat for artistic freedom and for diversity. But then, I want to earn a living with something I like to do. Like everyone. So I wouldn’t say no to a virtual dollar. Or to a virtual euro.”

In the meantime Demian continues to freelance in the advertising business and receives part of his income from Square Stories. He describes himself as a normal and boring person who spends his time thinking deep thoughts. Amongst other things he has been enjoying the online comics Pay Your Reality Tax and Nichtlustig. Demian’s influences for his surreal comics range from artists Woodring and Ware to the Great Gianna Sisters and Wipe Out 2097 videogames to the music of Radiohead (WIAK is named after a line in the Radiohead song “Paranoid Android”) to anime to his training as a graphic designer.

Demian is currently working on a new online comic, as time permits, which contains “no dialogue, nice creatures, big emotions.” He says “The style will be a bit more organic and the perspective a bit deeper than in WIAK, but it will be less colorful than Square Stories. It will also contain another form of storytelling, still without words, but… You’ll see.”

(Originally published at http://www.shift.com/content/web/405/1.html September, 2002)

Obsidian Magazine has an article about the significance of Scarabs in Ancient Egypt and modern occultism. “To observing ancients, it seemed the sacred scarab spontaneously generated from the ball of dung, fully grown and capable of self-sustenance.”
Link.