Let’s have a look at this stunning Stele, one of the many fascinating Steles from Egypt; the mysterious part of human history.

And here is “The Gate of heaven” or one of the feminine charms of ancient Egypt.

I could imagine that not only for me, but many also have the wish once to pass through this gate! What is always fascinating me when looking at these Steles, they tell us a lot of mystery which mostly are still unknown to us.

Here I try again a translation from the site; https://egyptophile.blogspot.com/ a great description by Marie Grillot about amazing painting Stele.

The stele of “Lady Taperet” at the Louvre

This so-called “Dame Tapéret” stele is certainly one of the most original artefacts of the Egyptian department of the Louvre museum. Its particularly rich and harmonious chromatic palette seduces us; the originality of the scenes which appear on each of the faces delights us, and the very representation of Dame Tapéret, all in femininity, charms us … As for the symbolism, it is exposed in every detail.

Referenced E 52, 31 cm high, 29 cm wide, 2.6 cm thick, dated from the XXIInd dynasty (approx. 900 BC), it is made of painted wood and of a curved shape. Indeed, as Auguste Mariette reminds us: “Until the 11th dynasty, the steles are quadrangular … But from the 11th dynasty, the stele takes the form that it only abandons on rare occasions. is rounded from above, as if it were intended to recall the curvature of the sky or that of the sarcophagus lids. “

On both sides, Dame Tapéret, the “dedicatee” of the stele, is dressed in a light, pleated, orange-coloured dress, with long and long sleeves, edged with bangs on the front. Completely transparent – we imagine it made in the finest linen – it suggests the curves of the body, especially the arch of the kidneys and the shape of the legs. Tapéret is wearing a long black tripartite wig, encircled by an orange band and surmounted by a delicate cone of perfume. It is adorned with a large necklace with several rows in green tones.

As a sign of adoration, her delicate hands are raised before the god Re whose representation differs from one face to the other.

The front of the stele is an enchantment, a profusion of colours, symbols and charming details. The hanger is fully occupied by the curved sign of the sky which rests and seems to rest on the heraldic plants of Egypt. A set of three stems, artistically positioned, on one side of the lotus and on the other of papyrus, adorn the opposite sides of the stele. The plants seem to “be born”, to spring from a human head which could be that of the god Nefertoum who, as “personification of one of the receptacles of the sun of the origins, is in connection with the perpetual rebirth of the star”.

The upper part is occupied, in its centre, by a representation of the conception of the world. The sun, orange and majestic, seems to be surrounded by two uraeus whose heads, erected on either side of its lower part, carry an ankh cross. On each side of the sun is an oudjat eye. The unit thus formed gives an impression of perfect balance.

Under the right eye is a rectangle made up of six vertical lines of hieroglyphs, coloured, which stand out against an ocher background.

The rest of the panel is occupied by a magnificent scene, whose highly accomplished pictorial quality is matched only by extreme originality.

Tapéret, which we described above, stands in front of Re-Horakhty with the head of a falcon. The god with grey flesh is wearing a black tripartite wig. Her muscular body is perfectly proportioned. She wears a green top with suspenders and a loincloth of two colours – orange and beige – held by a belt. It is adorned with many jewels, a large necklace, bracelets of humerus, wrist and ankle. In the left hand, she holds firmly a light green was sceptre as well as a striped stick while, in the right, there is a flail and an ankh cross. The orange solar star which is on its head darts its powerful rays symbolized by four rows of blooming and multicoloured flowers which go towards the face of the deceased. “Figured like multicoloured garlands of lily flowers, these rays bring it the promise of survival in the afterlife …”

Between the two figures is a table of offerings laden with food. A caring hand has placed delicate lotus flowers on it. On one side of the table, the leg is an elongated container, decorated with a flower, while the other is occupied by a delicately flowering branch. Dame Tapéret “offers Re a table heavily stocked with food, while the hieroglyphs placed behind her back assure her for herself” thousands of bread, beers, meats and poultry “, according to the millennial formula which allows humans to enjoy eternal sustenance. “

On the back of the stele, Tapéret reproduced identically, is in front of Atoum, “form of the sun god at sunset which echoes Rê-Horakhty, the sun of the day”. He appears without his “human” form, proudly wearing the double crown, in orange tones. Its flesh is grey, the curved false beard is treated in black. He is dressed and dressed in the same way as on the other side. What he holds in his hands are different, however: in the left an ouas sceptre and, in the right, a cane and an ankh cross. In the right centre of the upper part, there is also a rectangle made up of 6 vertical lines of hieroglyphs.

The body, night colour, of the beautiful goddess Nut, long but folded, hugs the entire border of the stele. Its slender legs occupy the entire left part, while its long torso stretches in the hanger, and its head and arms with hands stretched down to occupy the right part.

The pubis is marked with a black triangle and in front of it is a small ocher-red circle which represents the sun, and which is found twice: in the centre of the hanger and at the level of the mouth. “Dream sails on a river originating near the pubis and in the evening she engulfs it in her mouth to revive it every morning.”

The torso, thin and long, is decorated with eleven stars; the breasts are pointed and small. The face of the goddess is in the roundness of the hanger and her long hair descends in a long black cascade to the level of her wrists.

Hieroglyphs “arranged in a retrograde manner above Tapéret exhort these gods to grant to the deceased all the offerings that will be necessary for her to survive in the afterlife”.

In these scenes of worship in the sun is manifested the wish of the deceased to eternally accompany the god Re on his night journey and to be reborn with him each morning. The feet of the god as well as those of Tapéret are bare: they rest on a black band which is at the bottom of the stele and which symbolizes the earth.

It should be noted that “an inscription painted on the edge invokes the divinities Isis, Nephthys, Sokar and Hathor so that they grant to the Lady Tapéret all the funeral offerings necessary for her survival”.

The origin of this stele, the “composition of which combines traditional elements and plastic innovations” remains unfortunately unknown.

She entered the Louvre, thanks to a donation from Louis Batissier. This doctor, art lover, inspector of historic monuments in the Allier in 1839, was, after several charges, appointed consul of France in Suez in 1848. He stayed there for thirteen years, and, befriending Auguste Mariette, was passionate about Egyptology. He built up a fine collection of antiques and it was in 1851 that he offered the stele to the Paris museum, as well as vases, papyrus, amulets …

Marie Grillot

Sources

” Stele of Lady Taperet ” (Louvre)

Ancient Egypt at theLouvre, Guillemette Andreu, Marie-Hélène Rutschowscaya, Christiane Ziegler, 1997

The gates of heaven: worldviews in ancientEgypt, March 2009 Jocelyne Berlandini Keller, Annie Gasse, Luke Gabolde

Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress ofEgyptologists, Cairo, 2000, Volume 2, Lyla Pinch Brock; American University in Cairo Press, 2003

Egyptian mythologydictionary, Isabel Franco, 2013

Universal Exhibition of 1867. Description of the EgyptianPark, Auguste Mariette, 1867

Donors of theLouvre, Paris, Louvre 1989

” Louis Batissier ” (INHA)

The word has been said 🙏❤🙏🥰

A worthy read 🙏💖🙏

http://symbolreader.net/2020/04/11/reading-the-red-book-19/

Of course, I couldn’t begin this without a mention from the master of the Dark-Side.

This creature is one of my most favourites in all fairytales which I have swallowed at an early age as a child and still onto now! The Div (Demon) in old Persian fairytales have a great presence and unusually as a man might expect, for me, they were very interesting! Their essential came from Gnome or as Irish folklore leprechaun.

As I remember it was almost normal to see such creatures in the bathrooms or elsewhere.

And Yes! They play a huge role in the Persian fairy tales, of course, I’m not talking about the “Thousands and one night”, there are so many more fairy tales of that kind in our history.

Though, in the time as a child; for us two (Al, my brother and me) our parents had no time to read out or aloud these wonderful stories for us. We had to get used to reading them by ourselves. And we were just hungrily got them in.

I found here some interesting different name for this subject.;

The Infernal Names

Abaddon—(Hebrew) the destroyer.
Adramalech—Samarian devil.
Ahpuch—Mayan devil.
Ahriman—The Mazdean devil. (This is in old Perian culture as mighty as the God-self; Ahuramazda: The Duality.
Amon—Egyptian ram-headed god of life and reproduction.
Apollyon—Greek synonym for Satan, the archfiend.
Asmodeus—Hebrew devil of sensuality and luxury, originally “creature of judgment”(? 😮😉😅) via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_infernal_names

To be shared is here a nice article about the way of the “Imagination of this creature”. Let see and read. 💖🙏

The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in a 1921 Illustrated Manuscript from Iran

Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogenous compendium of creatures from ancient folk tale, myth, and demonology around the world.

Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of  what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind. Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world.” Although a lesser field than angelology, the influence of this fascinatingly diverse canon only broadened over time.

“The natives recorded in the Talmud” soon became “thoroughly integrated” with the many demons of Christian Europe and the Islamic world, forming a sprawling hell whose denizens hail from at least three continents, and who have mixed freely in alchemical, astrological, and other occult works since at least the 13th century and into the present. One example from the early 20th century, a 1902 treatise on divination from Isfahan, a city in central Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of watercolors added in 1921 that could easily be mistaken for illustrations from the early Middle Ages.

As the Public Domain Review notes:

The wonderful images draw on Near Eastern demonological traditions that stretch back millennia — to the days when the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud asserted it was a blessing demons were invisible, since, “if the eye would be granted permission to see, no creature would be able to stand in the face of the demons that surround it.”

The author of the treatise, a rammal, or soothsayer, himself “attributes his knowledge to the Biblical Solomon, who was known for his power over demons and spirits,” writes Ali Karjoo-Ravary, a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Predating Islam, “the depiction of demons in the Near East… was frequently used for magical and talismanic purposes,” just as it was by occultists like Aleister Crowley at the time these illustrations were made.

“Not all of the 56 painted illustrations in the manuscript depict demonic beings,” the Public Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the animals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scorpion — associated with the zodiac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fantastic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plenty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delighted.

A blue man with claws, four horns, and a projecting red tongue is no less frightening for the fact that he’s wearing a candy-striped loincloth. In another image we see a moustachioed goat man with tuber-nose and polka dot skin maniacally concocting a less-than-appetising dish. One recurring (and worrying) theme is demons visiting sleepers in their beds, scenes involving such pleasant activities as tooth-pulling, eye-gouging, and — in one of the most engrossing illustrations — a bout of foot-licking (performed by a reptilian feline with a shark-toothed tail).

There’s a playful Bosch-ian quality to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our perspective as absurd, he apparently took his bizarre inventions absolutely seriously. So too, we might assume, did the illustrator here. We might wonder, as Woolf did, about this work as the product of “suffering human beings… attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” What kinds of ordinary, material concerns might have afflicted this artist, as he (we presume) imagined demons gouging the eyes and licking the feet of people tucked safely in their beds?

See many more of these strange paintings at the Public Domain Review.

http://www.openculture.com/

Yes, today according to Christian history, is the day in which Jesus has been crucified. In Germany this day called Karfreitag as in English they call it Good Friday and I can’t say why is it so different; as I read somewhere; it once has been called God’s Friday and then it became for Good!

This is an explanation about its meaning in German; Karfreitag is the day where Christians remember the crucifixion of Christ. According to Duden, the Kar in Karfreitag comes from the Mid High German word chara, which means “wail,” “sorrow” or “lamentation.” Another, less common word for Karfreitag is stiller Freitag – “silent Friday.” via https://www.thelocal.de/20190419/karfreitag

Here I’ve found an interesting article about the culprit who was responsible for this event: Pontius Pilate. The question is; what actually had happened to the malefactor? It isn’t clear what, but the fact is that he’s never been turned in to stone! In any case if one wants to damn him to the highest level in the hell, I would say in my opinion; he might do his order to make this day an unforgettable day. 🙏💖

The Strange Afterlife of Pontius Pilate

The enduring legacy of the Roman governor who faced the ultimate politician’s dilemma. Kevin Butcher | Published 25 March 2016

Christ before Pilate, Mihály Munkácsy, 1881

Towards the end of the second century AD the pagan intellectual Celsus wrote an anti-Christian treatise mocking belief in Jesus Christ. If Jesus really had been the Son of God, he asked, why hadn’t God punished Pontius Pilate, the man responsible for crucifying him? Why had Pilate not been driven insane or torn apart, like the characters in Greek myths? Why had no calamity befallen him?

While there are plenty of later Christian traditions about the punishment of Pontius Pilate, all of these seem to belong to a period long after Celsus was writing. Celsus’ challenge, and the response of early Christians to it, suggests that there was more than a kernel of truth in the claim that the Prefect of Judaea had evaded misfortune. This is implicit from the efforts early Christians made to absolve him of responsibility for the Crucifixion.

The only reliable statement we have about Pilate’s life after his time in Judaea comes from the pen of the Jewish writer Josephus. In his Antiquities of the Jews, written about 60 years after the events, Josephus states that Pilate was recalled to Rome after his mishandling of a riot involving the Samaritans in AD 36. For this he would have expected to face a hearing before the Emperor Tiberius, the aged but uncompromising ruler who had appointed him ten years earlier. Pilate hurried back, but by the time he arrived, in March AD 37, the ailing Tiberius had died. A new emperor, Caligula, had taken up the reins of power. 

What happened next is guesswork. Josephus says nothing more about him, implying that there was no hearing. Perhaps, in the general euphoria surrounding Caligula’s accession, his case was put on hold, or simply forgotten. Maybe the hearing did go ahead and he was acquitted. For all we know, he was given another posting. 

The lack of a suitably grisly fate for Pilate put Christian apologists in a quandary. As governor, it was Pilate’s job to pass judgement in capital cases: he was the one who condemned Jesus to suffer on the cross. There was no circumventing his guilt. Divine punishment should have followed.

Yet in the early years of Christianity it was difficult to make such claims. The Roman state was suspicious of the new cult and, if Christians wanted to avoid confrontation, it was best not to accuse one of Rome’s officials of deicide. The canonical Gospels stressed that Pilate was not fully to blame. He could find no fault in Jesus: ‘I have found in him no grounds for the death penalty. Therefore I will have him punished and then release him’, Pilate declares in Luke’s Gospel. John has Pilate twice announce ‘I find no basis for a charge against him’. The apocryphal Gospel of Peter, thought by many scholars to be among the earliest Christian texts, went even further. In this, Pilate and his soldiers play no part in the crowd’s mocking or torturing of Jesus. He himself declares ‘I am pure from the blood of the Son of God’ and, together with his soldiers, who guard the tomb of Jesus, he conspires to keep the miracle of the Resurrection secret from the Jewish priests. 

The tradition of a blameless Pilate, a witness to the Passion, led to a strange early Christian fascination with him. By the second century AD, fake letters of Pilate, recounting the wondrous story of Jesus, circulated among the faithful. The so-called Acts of Pilate, allegedly deriving from the governor’s own records, portray Pilate as a convert. Tertullian, the late second-century Christian theologian, described Pilate as someone ‘who himself also in his own conscience was now a Christian’ and alleged that Tiberius was so convinced by Pilate’s reports that he would have placed Jesus among the Roman gods had not the Senate refused. So influential were the various versions of the Acts of Pilate that in the early fourth century the Roman state created and promoted an anti-Christian, ‘true’, pagan version in an attempt to discredit the Christian ones. Needless to say this was no more reliable than its rivals.

All of this might seem merely capricious, but the absolution of Pilate came at a terrible cost. The early Christians shifted the blame for the Crucifixion onto others. A rebuttal of the arguments of Celsus, written by the third-century bishop Origen, shows this clearly: ‘It was not so much Pilate that condemned Him,’ he wrote, ‘as the Jewish nation’. Celsus had chosen the wrong culprit; and the fact that the Jewish nation had been torn apart by the Romans and dispersed across the face of the earth was proof of God’s retribution. The fake letters and the Christian versions of the Acts of Pilate said much the same thing, as did other Christian apologists. The Acts went so far as to have the Jewish crowd telling Pilate that they willingly accept the blood-guilt, an echo of the Gospel of Matthew, which has the same crowd shouting ‘his blood be on us and our children!’ These claims formed a basis for Christian persecution of the Jews right up to modern times. 

Video: Professor Kevin Butcher of the University of Warwick on the real Pontius Pilate

Pilate’s costly absolution was the product of specific religious and political circumstances. When the Roman Empire became a Christian state in the fourth century, there was no longer any need to emphasise his innocence. The Nicene Creed, formulated under Emperor Constantine in AD 325 and emended in AD 381, stated bluntly that Christ ‘was crucified under Pontius Pilate’. It became acceptable to cast Pilate as a villain and a range of myths developed describing his grisly end.

Some influential Christians demurred, however. Saint Augustine, writing in the sixth century, argued that when Pilate wrote on the cross ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, he really meant it: ‘It could not be torn from his heart that Jesus was the King of the Jews.’ 

While the West went on to develop the tradition of a ‘bad’ Pilate who was punished for his misdeeds, the Eastern Church preferred a more sympathetic interpretation. Not only was Pilate a Christian; he was a confessor and even a martyr. One eastern text, The Handing Over of Pilate, has Tiberius ordering the governor to be beheaded for having allowed the Crucifixion to go ahead. First Pilate repents and then a voice from heaven proclaims that all nations will bless him, because under his governorship the prophecies about Christ were fulfilled. Finally an angel takes charge of his severed head. In some accounts he is buried with his wife and two children next to the tomb of Jesus – the ultimate martyr’s sepulchre.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate’s wife warns her husband not to harm Jesus and for this she achieved sainthood among Orthodox Christians. The Copts and Christians of Ethiopia took the next step and canonised Pilate himself. An Ethiopian collection of hagiographies lists St Pilate’s Day as the 25th of the summer month of Sanne, a day shared with his wife Procla and the saints Jude, Peter and Paul: 

Salutation to Pilate, who washed his hands 
To show he himself was innocent of the blood of Jesus Christ

Those familiar with the western tradition may find the idea of St Pontius Pilate curious or even absurd. But the fascination with Pilate never abates. From the Acts of Pilate to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margerita, the man who cross-examined and crucified Jesus remains an enigma, a shadowy metaphor for opposites: equivocation and stubbornness, cowardice and heroism, cruelty and clemency. His dilemma – to do the right thing or the popular thing – is every ruler’s quandary. Perhaps that is why people can sympathise with him: we too must sometimes face a difficult choice; though, fortunately for us, its legacy is likely to be less enduring.

Kevin Butcher is Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick and the author of The Further Adventures of Pontius Pilate.

via https://www.historytoday.com/homepage