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The "One God" & Distinction Between Magical And Religious Texts In Ancient Egypt
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[QUOTE="Ross_Я, post: 109595, member: 6806"] Jan Assman's problem is that despite all his smarts and interesting takes he is a firm christian - up to the point of blindness. He looks at non-abrahamic Gods as false ones by default, and therefore at the societies that worshipped those Gods as... well, not quite heretical, but keep reading. And see, you cannot really expect non-biased looks from a man like that. Among his other interesting takes, he - rather desperately - tries to find the reason for the existence of the other Gods. His latest - to my awareness - theory comes among the lines of In other words, other Gods only exist as a test for christians. Which is... a weird take. He kind of agrees that they are not demons, yet somehow, in their divinity, they are still not anyhow worthy of any sort of reverence. It's a kind of double-thinking that is worth of discussion of its own. Either way, with this weird mindset, Assman kind of tries to perceive egyptians as if they already knew about christian God and as if they were somehow christian. This rather askew look provides some interesting insights and theories, but I will insist that it is basically incorrect from point one. This pretty much sums up my position. By the way, even though I have not read Moses The Egyptian, I read a document which mentioned that book. In fact, the quote above is from that document, and here's another one: Both come from his work named Exodus And Memory: [URL unfurl="true"]http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/3747/1/Assmann_Exodus_and_Memory_2015.pdf[/URL] As for platonism - I can only admit that it is, so far, quite a blind spot for me, and I should read up on it one day, yet at this point I cannot really comment on it. There's though, as I pointed out, a visible disctinction between a myth, a text on philosophy, and a text describing a theurgic rite in Ancient Egyptian literature. Those three are out of the question. The real trouble is the division between theurgic rites and magic, because egyptians didn't have a separate word for the religion and magic - or for something like magic, because it wasn't "magic" as we understand it as well. The word they used for both is HkA ([B]ḥkꜣ[/B]) which you can translate somewhere along the lines of "magical power" or "willpower" or, I don't know, "psychic power". Jedi mind tricks kind of stuff - not really magic and not really religion. As I pointed out though, in my eyes the distinction between magical rites written on the walls on tombs and religious rituals performed in temples is quite clear, despite the lack of proper words in the language. It's the style of the text, the overall wording, the composition even - it's quite clear what's what to me. Despite the fact that magic and religion were deeply intertwined, it is nevertheless easy to understand which texts were for priests and masses - and which one were for dubious magical rituals. It is quite as clear as the distinction between faith healers and TV-preachers and actual priests nowadays. Or so it seems to me, at least - as life shows, a lot of people trust radio preachers just as much as if they were actual miracle workers, so what do I know... [/QUOTE]
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