Drat this working for a living all to heck.

Just because the province is burning down, and I've been medically tested to the eyebrows, doesn't mean that I have stopped obsessing about Hathor.[1] I don't feel that I wish to revive her worship, since, for heck's sake, I don't know where to start; but I wouldn't mind stealing some of the trappings, such as the sistrum.

The sistrum is a rattle, and it was used for several thousand years prior to current era, and a little bit into current era, and the coptic church still uses it. So we're talking three or four thousand years - and people's ideas change. It could be made of wood or metal or fired clay. It could have its rattles hidden inside a miniature shrine. It could be a forked stick with rattles between the forks. It could be a metal hoop on a metal handle, with the rattles on loose metal wires. It often had a Hathor head at the join between the hoop and the handle - one on each side. Interestingly, in the later Greek and Roman versions there are four wires without rattles, but in Egyptian ones there are three. In a few metal sistrums there are only the three wires and no rattles. The sound comes from the loose wires shifting back and forth.

Sometimes the wires, whether with rattles or not, are in the shape of the "cobra at rest" hieroglyph. Here is the "cobra at rest" hieroglyph:
https://wordsimilarity.com/en/biliteral
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs&curid=24883394#I
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cobra_at_rest_(dj_hieroglyph)

Hieroglyphs work the same way letters do in our alphabet: each one has a sound, and when said together a word is made. Asking the meaning of "G" in isolation is mostly meaningless. However, some letters do get some extra meaning baggage, such as "A" meaning first or best, and "F" meaning failure, and "Z" meaning end. The "cobra at rest" hieroglyph has a little bit of that. The Uraeus is the rearing cobra featured on the king's crown, and is the protector of the king. The "cobra at rest" is unthreatened. The hieroglyph alone can mean "to speak".

Here are examples of the sistrums that have "cobra at rest" shaped wires:
https://collections.mfa.org/objects/164263
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/553814
Some of them even go so far as to put cobra heads on the short upturned ends.

The sistrum was used to worship Hathor, and people speak of the sound of the sistrum being pleasing and soothing to Hathor. How cool that the wires could be shaped into a "letter" that had extra meaning.

Here are a couple of good "make your own" resources:
http://aws.cricketmedia.com/media/20160315161902/Music-Activity.pdf
https://kingshillbwmat.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020/11/9-Make-an-Ancient-Egyptian-Sistrum-Craft-Instructions.pdf

[1] - important to remember that I think the deity of the universe is the universe and not human, and that any god labels we use are human generated and can't capture the whole being. So, investigating a human construct is interesting, since it points to things we're currently missing, but it is still a human construct.

So, as always, the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know.

I haven't got a clear picture yet, but I do know that my original idea of the chronological order of the Hathor images we have left is wrong, but I haven't quite got a grip on which image was first and which the last.

One thing is that when Hathor is shown full face, you cannot mistake her for any other being but Hathor - her face is very distinctive. She often is shown with blue hair.

I haven't yet seen the "typical offering" of two mirrors - but I have seen a number of mirrors with Hathor faces decorating the join between the handle and the mirror.

I now have a better idea of the mechanics of Hathor worship. In a temple that had her image, the image was kept inside in the dark in the inner most windowless room, in a "naos" or shrine. Only a select group actually served the goddess image, which may have included the Pharo as one of the people permitted to approach the image. The temples were a "standard" shape, and then a yard around them where common people could make their more modest offerings. Interestingly, it wasn't uncommon for the temple of one deity to have side shrines to other deities - sort of permanent guest rooms.

Again, all this covers about 3000 years, so people change their minds, and things go in and out of fashion, and some of the variety of ideas about each of the gods is that they start as local to a particular town, and then merge and diverge.

Apparently Ancient Egyptian is a gendered language, and bread is masculine and beer is feminine.

So. Mirrors. Another source says that these mirrors offered to Hathor represented the Sun and the Moon - which just seems so unlikely. The Egyptians already have deities for the Sun and the Moon, and while Hathor is adorned with the Sun Disc, she is not also adorned with a Moon disc/crescent/what have you. Now, if they had said the mirrors represented Bread and Beer, that would have been more believable. She is the goddess of eating and drinking and partying, after all.

I do, however, have a new book I am looking forward to:
Hathor; a Reintroduction to an Ancient Egyptian Goddess. By Lesley Jackson, 2013.

I have good hopes of this book since it has footnotes everywhere, and ten pages of bibliography. I am disappointed that there aren't any glossy photographs, but the internet has lots. This isn't going to be a book full of wishful waffle, or worse, some wanton essential oil piffle uttered by a new age poser. I can make my own piffle, thank you.

... it turns out that using the phrase, "the hand of God" to refer to Hathor is to say masturbation.

Now I don't know whether the Five Gifts of Hathor are caught up in this, but since the priest's final words are apparently, "... if you lose one, you have one more ..." I suspect it is hovering in the back of everyone's mind.

Oh well. :)

I always find writing about a puzzle to be a good way to resolve/reconsider issues in it. Beware: this is personal-view inner-life convictions review.

Since Lorne's death I have been attending my parents's Christian affiliated place of worship. They were the only group of people I knew in town. Raised Christian in a loose C&E (Christmas and Easter) fashion; brief spell of committment ruined by idealism; searching; finding Wicca and a Wiccan spouse; following it in a loose S&Y (Samhain and Yule) fashion. I held a small non-faith memorial for Lorne, and there were Wiccan trappings which I doubt that anyone I didn't tell noticed.

The people of my parents's place of worship follow the teachings. They walk the walk. They have been very helpful and kind and welcoming to my parents, and to Lorne and I because of my parents. My reason for attending was loneliness and, if the place was going to be the wrong theology, it might as well be with people I trusted.

So, I took it as an opportunity to review my decision about Christianity. I read the scripture as we visited it. I searched online and read articles about various concepts[1], and I thought a lot.

The first issue for me is that I don't believe in a personal god. The whole issue of resolving why bad things happen to good people (or good things happen to bad people) disappears when you just consider the deity as a raw power. Not unsophisticated, but not human-scaled. A personal god would not create a world where everything eats everything else. The only thing in this world that doesn't eat something else to survive is some bacteria that survives on absorbing energy from transforming minerals (iron and magnesium in basalt, for instance). Even plants need the decay of once-living things. But for animate things with blood, every day is a horror show. I've been watching a quail pair this year. They made it through courting and mating and nesting. They ate separately until all the eggs hatched, and then they started taking their crew of eight chicks around to show them what to eat and how to run away. We are down to one parent and two chicks, and we haven't made it to the solstice yet, never mind next breeding season.

A deity that had a human sense of love wouldn't create a world where everything eats each other's babies.

So what is it, then? Is it ‘Probably some great white crackling thing. Like an electric storm in trousers,’ said Miss Flitworth. [Pratchett, Reaper Man.] Maybe?

I know Wicca uses the metaphor of the God and the Goddess as a way to address and humanize an unknowable power. I think metaphors are useful until one expects the power one has tried to shove in a human construct to behave humanly. It won't; it can't.

I think electricity is a good metaphor. It can be tamed to run a human cel phone and it can zap a person dead and it can spark a wildfire. It is an emergent property, and it is everywhere and nowhere at once. Deity is continuum life and death; death feeding life, life dissolving into death; helplessly cycling. I think deity and universe are faces of a coin. The universe is what deity does.

Can one worship such a thing? I dunno. I think gratitude is spontaneous and doesn't need a humanized target to be felt. Perhaps worship is tuning into the unified nature. However, I doubt that petitions are granted.

There is one thing about Christianity I value. If you have any dreams of going back to the old ways and perhaps worshipping Vesta/Hestia, or something even older, something that has perhaps thousands of years of human-powered peity behind it, it doesn't take long to discover that everything was a blood fest. Animals were sacrificed left and right, sometimes people were sacrificed. Sacrifice did not mean giving up chocolate. Sacrifice meant that something lost its life so you could satisfy the deity. Christianity says that Christ was the one true sacrifice, and that now that he has satisfied the deity, no other sacrifices are needed or wanted. I have been conditioned by a Christian upbringing: I don't want to sacrifice a white dove and dribble its blood all over the altar so that I can speak to the deity and ask it to change the universe in my favour.

So. My deity is not personal. My deity does some beautiful stuff and some terrible stuff. Love might be the answer, but I think it could also be gravity. The universe is what the deity does, and asking why something happened is futile - and human - which deity and universe are not.

I also don't believe in the continuation of the personality. The life force returns to the deity.[2] So, the thing which animated Lorne went back to the pool of animation, but the flavour that was identifiable as Lorne is dissolved.

[1] - fascinated by "epiousios". This is the word translated as "our 'daily' bread" in the Lord's prayer. This is the only time this word appears in any greek text anywhere, and the word "daily" is the traditional translation, but there were puzzles about it even in the way back. You'd wish that at least the prayer given by the sog would be straightforward, but even there, translation is approximate - and unresolvable.

[2] - If you read Christianity carefully you'll realize that it also believes that everything not of God is burned away before there is a return to God. Hallmark Heaven doesn't exist anywhere - except in human petitions.