CAPÍTULO IV. RESULTADOS Y DISCUSIÓN 20
4.1.3 ANÁLISIS MULTIDIMENSIONAL DE LA PARROQUIA RICAURTE
Besides passing for an iconoclast, Seth appears as a revealer of mys-teries. This brings us back to the remark by Jamblichos:
Everything remains perfect and complete,
because the mysteries in Abydos have never been uncovered.
Seth threatens all the mysteries of Egypt with his insatiable curiosity and reckless greed. He destroys every secret, breaks every taboo, defiles all that is pure, and desecrates all that is sacred. The rites are performed to ward him off
lest the movements of the sun become known, rich in trajectories in crossing the sky,
lest the chest in Heliopolis be opened and it be seen what it contains,
lest the garment in Memphis be loosened and the arm of “so-and-so” become visible, lest the lamp be extinguished in the night of evil, in that time which must never happen,
lest the four spells in Heliopolis become known and the heaven falls down in hearing them, lest the seal of Anubis be broken
and the clay of Ptah be removed, lest the hiding shrubbery be cut down in order to expel the one whom it conceals.26
Seth is the god of blasphemous and scandalous curiosity. This is also the theme of a myth told by Ovid27and several other ancient authors
that provides an explanation of animal worship in ancient Egypt.28The gods, it is revealed, so feared the reckless curiosity of Seth-Typhon that they decided to disguise themselves in the shapes of animals. Later they declared these animals sacred out of gratitude to them. Diodorus of Sicily, who calls the cult of the animals an aporrh¯eton dogma (unspeakable secret),29 replaces “Seth” with “humankind” in his rendering of the story, which is how he claims to have heard it in Egypt. It seems possible that this very strong and conspicuous condemnation of curiosity reflects an Egyptian reaction to the scientific and investigative mind of the Greeks, who subjected the Egyptians to a veritable program of “Egyp-tological” research. It strangely foreshadows Saint Augustine’s verdict on curiosity, which dominated the occidental attitude toward the world and nature until the end of the sixteenth century.30 Another work in which the theme of curiosity plays a central role is The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Madauros. Lucius, the hero, dabbles in magic out of an in-satiable curiosity and is punished by being transformed into an ass, the animal of Seth, whose principal vice he practiced.31
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n the Late Period the god Seth became the target of rituals of hatred and execration. Here one encounters the language of violence in the context of polytheism. One of these rituals of hatred is entitled “the rit-ual of overthrowing Seth and his cohorts.” It opens with the following prescription:Let a figure of Seth be brought made of red wax,
his name inscribed on its breast, saying “Seth, the miserable.”
Moreover, let his figure be drawn on an empty sheet of fresh papyrus with fresh ink.
Alternatively, bring a figure made of acacia or hema-wood.
To bind it with the sinew of a red bull; to recite over it.
To stamp on it with the left foot; to recite over it.
To hit it with a spear; to recite over it.
To cut it with a knife; to recite over it.
To put it into the fire; to recite over it.
To spit on it many times in the fire; to recite over it.32
The following pages contain the endless spells that were to be recited during the execution of these symbolic actions against the figure of Seth. Execration rituals were a familiar phenomenon in ancient Egypt.
They were always directed against political enemies of Pharaoh, both inside Egypt and abroad. Pots or figurines, inscribed with the names of the enemies, were smashed, burned, and buried with the intention of
putting a curse on these individuals to prevent them from hostile actions against Pharaoh and to shorten their days. The earliest examples of this custom date back to the third millennium BCE. The application of these rituals to Seth, in a highly elaborated form, marks the climax of what I would call the “politicization of evil.” In a papyrus dating from about the same time period we read:
If the ceremonies for Osiris are neglected in their time at this place . . .
the country will be deprived of its laws.
The plebs will abandon their superiors and there are no orders for the masses.
If the foe is not beheaded that is at hand made of wax, on papyrus, or of wood
according to the prescriptions of the ritual, then the foreign countries will rebel against Egypt and civil war and revolution will rise in the whole country.
The king in his palace will not be obeyed anymore and the land will be deprived of its defence.33
In the Late Period the ceremonies for Osiris and the rites against Seth are given a decidedly political meaning. Ritual violence acted out in the name of a deity—in this case Osiris—is turned into political vio-lence acted out against rebels and foreign enemies in the name of the state and the Pharaoh The rituals acquire a political meaning and polit-ical actions acquire a religious meaning. This corresponds closely to the Neo-Assyrian system.
In Greco-Roman times, when Egypt was confronted first with Hel-lenism and Judaism and then with Christianity, whose success in Egypt was quite overwhelming, the image of the Asiatic foe increasingly as-sumed the traits of an atheist, an enemy and persecutor of religion. The evil that the foreigners were believed to have caused Egypt was de-scribed not in terms of political oppression but religious persecution. To conclude, let me quote the famous apocalypse from the hermetic trea-tise in which Asclepius laments the end of Egyptian religion:
A time will come when it will appear that the Egyptians wor-shipped the divinity with faithful mind and painstaking reverence—
for no purpose. All their holy service will be disappointed and perish without effect, for divinity will return from earth to heaven and Egypt will be abandoned. The land that was the seat of rev-erence will be widowed by the powers and left destitute of their presence. When foreigners occupy the land and territory, not only
will reverence fall into neglect but, even harder, a prohibition under penalty prescribed by law will be enacted against reverence, fidelity, and divine worship. [One recognizes the echo of Osarsiph’s legislation.]
Then this most holy land, seat of shrines and temples, will be filled completely with tombs and corpses.
O Egypt, Egypt! Of your reverent deeds only stories will sur-vive and they will be incredible to your children! Only words cut in stone will survive to recount your faithful works, and the Scythian or Indian or some such neighboring barbarian will dwell in Egypt.
For divinity goes back to heaven and all the people will die, de-serted, as Egypt will be widowed and deserted by god and human.
I call on you, most holy river, and I tell your future: a torrent of blood will fill the Nile to the banks and pollute the divine wa-ters. . . . Whoever survives will be recognized as an Egyptian only by his language; in his actions he will seem a foreigner. . . .
A land once holy, most loving of divinity, by reason of her rev-erence the only land on earth where the gods settled, she who taught holiness and fidelity will be an example of utter unbelief. In their weariness the people of that time will find the world nothing to wonder at or to worship. This universe—a good thing that never had, nor has, nor will have its better—will be endangered. People will find it oppressive and scorn it. They will not cherish this entire world . . .
No one will look up to heaven. The reverent will be thought mad, the irreverent wise. Whoever dedicates himself to reverence of mind will find himself facing a capital penalty. They will establish new laws, new justice. Nothing holy, nothing reverent nor worthy of heaven or heavenly beings will be heard of or believed in the mind.
How mournful when the gods withdraw from mankind! Then neither will the earth stand firm nor the sea be navigable; stars will not cross heaven, nor will the course of the stars stand firm in heaven. Every divine voice will grow mute in enforced silence. The fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will no more be fertile; and the very air will droop in gloomy lethargy.
Such will be the old age of the world: irreverence, disorder, and disregard for everything good.34
This text, which was written in view of the rise of Christianity and related movements—especially Gnosticism—best expresses the Egyp-tian or polytheist’s view of exclusive monotheism.
What one may learn from this example is how much violence there is in polytheism. Violence is expressed as existing between gods, resulting
in combat, bloodshed, murder, destruction, desecration, humiliation, and other forms of conflict within the divine world. These conflicts re-flect and give expression to conflicts, antagonisms, and oppositions ex-perienced in the visible world and are, in turn, reflected and expressed by human violence in the frame of ritual performance. Violence is con-tained in but also concon-tained—that is, held in containment—by polythe-ism. This is why polytheistic violence is intrasystemic. As Michael Fish-bane has pointed out,35although pre-monotheistic combat myths, left many traces in the Hebrew Bible, this mythical expression of violence is excluded in monotheism. Monotheism put an end to “polytheistic,”
intrasystemic violence but not, unfortunately, to violence as such.
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