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| Heru and Sutekh |
I often get the idea that people don’t understand Balance, and the roles of Heru (Horus) and Sutekh (Set). One of the reasons is undoubtedly that due to the Christian influence on Western civilization we tend to see things in Good/Bad polarities. It’s interesting that most of us can wrap our minds around the different creation stories as being both true and not-true. But we fasten on the “Sutekh killed Ausir and fought Heru for the throne” story as the one true version and let that color our thinking. Heru is Good, and Sutekh is Evil. Maybe that’s not the whole story. Exhibit A and exhibit B.
If people move beyond the Heru Good / Set Bad, they tend to view Heru as order and Sutekh as chaos. That’s a little better, but still, people have difficulty thinking of any positive application of “chaos”, so it’s still bad in their minds. So we still have a balance between good and bad. Not quite right, still. We like order. We like having a steady paycheck. We like having the people we love stick around. Hmmmm.
I’m a fan of Terry Pratchett, and love his Discworld books and other stories. In addition to being entertaining, there is a huge dollop of wisdom sneaked in there. He seems to have an almost Kemetic worldview sometimes. So. Perfect order. His Auditors of Reality come to mind. They make sure the universe is an orderly place. They hate life, imagination, just about anything that isn’t dead and sterile. Let’s get our heads around that as “perfect order.”
My model for that dichotomy is “Static” and “Dynamic”. You can see positives and negatives in both of them, and the balance between both makes sense and feels right.
Let’s take it one step further and think of cosmology. You could think of the ultimate in “Static” as the heat death of the universe (one possible fate, there are several others). Dead stars, dead planets. The ultimate in “Dynamic” was the moment of the Big Bang, when it was too hot for ordinary matter. We could not exist in either- we inhabit the balance between them. You can almost see Sutekh up there, in the front of Ra’s “Millions of Years” barque, spearing Apep and the formless uncreated Nuun that was the pre-universe.
