5 years ago my son asked me this question as we were ending the Christmas celebration season. Seven days before New Years was recognized in his consciousness (December 25) on the Gregorian calendar and Seven days after (January 7) in the consciousness of his Coptic Egyptian school friends. To the ancients the celebration spanned the entire time plus a couple weeks, with different cultures shorting different days. However, mostly among merchants and schools the celebrations and recognition time has persisted throughout the time period. I think its important to note before I get into all this that I don't think we should focus here on when the New Year (Thoth 1) was for those in Kemet vs when it is in America today, on a day for day calendar basis. What I am looking at here is patterns in culture and piecing the puzzle together based off commonalities among traditions cross culturally.
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| Sopdet in red dress, star, red headband |
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| Her hieroglyph |
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| Her hieroglyph |
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| Bread Cone (di) Middle Kingdom |
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| Hagia Sophia "Holy Wisdom" 532AD, Instanbul, Turkey |
Another building to note is the Hagia Sophia. Sophia being the Greek term for Wisdom or Lady Wisdom. This dome was constructed by by Justinian in 532AD on the site of an earlier Greek Orthodox Christian church "Great Church/Magna Ecclesia", Catholic cathedral, then Ottoman Mosque, then a museum in 1935. The original church was dedicated to the Wisdom of God, the Logos, of the Trinity with its patronal feast taking place on December 25th, "the commemoration of the birth of the incarnation of the Logos in Christ". The Blue Mosque nearby was built in 1616. The Obelisk of Theodosius, also nearby, was brought to Constantinople from Egypt, making it the 7th addition to the minarets. This obelisk was originally of Pharah Thutmose III (1479-1425BC) and is today known as At Meydani or Sultanahmet Medani (Sultan Ahmet Suare). The procession of the Imperial guilds or corporations was held at this site. These parades were known to be riotous and filling the town with hundreds if not thousands of merchants who boasted of their goods and products coming from Egypt. Meat was a mainfare, beef/cow specifically. When the processions were over each guild had to give its possessions to the Sultan as gifts followed by prayer. According to The Encyclopaedia of Islam: Fascicules 111-112 : Masrah Mawlid, "All the guilds and the corporations had their own pennants; for example, the guild of lady's slipper-makers had a pennant with golden and silver threads and tassels, the cord-makers had a red and green one. The weavers had two different pennants: one red, and the other red, yellow, and green. Sometimes these guilds included wild animals." The Weavers Guild or The Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Dublin (1446-1840), the original textile guild, "the Merchants" was London's oldest company. Medieval guilds were religious fraternities. They held parades where various guilds enacted scenes from the bible. I hope you are seeing my vision of the early European practice of a Christmas/new years parade and Egyptian/Kemetic influence. The vaulting stands tall like an observatory and looks like a pupil from the inside.
Considering that stories of good and evil often have ancient origins and have often
been juxtaposed depending on the story teller I wanted to reduce these characters to its commonalities. So, I started with from above, fallen to earth, and the color red. From this I wanted to know what stories were created in Kemet of "gods", which I conceptualize as characters or mascots to convey stories, wearing red or red and white or red and black. Were there any other people coming from Africa to global communities in ancient times carrying with them these ideas? What other characters of modern times carry on these types of ideas?
One common theme I noticed in observing the costume of the color red when I looked back in time coming forward to the present was judgement. Ideas such as "Judges" or"Judgement" or "Judgement Day" or "Scales of Justice" or "Maat" were key to this backdrop of story development.
An interesting correlation to judgement and the color red is the Catholic Red Mass celebration. Each judicial year the Catholic Lawyers' Guild of the Archdiocese of Boston still conducts the traditional Red Mass to ask for divine guidance in the proper representation of clients and in the proper administration of justice in the courts and in public office, according to their website. The Red Mass started in England in the Middle Ages and continued through World War II. This legal guild further states that "Red Mass is celebrated in honor of the Holy Spirit as the source of wisdom, understanding, counsel and fortitude, gifts which shine forth preeminently in the dispensing of justice in the courtroom as well as in the individual lawyer's office. Other blessings that are commonly requested to prevail in the minds, offices, and court rooms are Divine strength, wisdom, truth, and justice." Another site for the Diocese of Cleveland Lawyers Guild says the "Red Mass originated in the Cathedral of Paris in 1245 to invoke the guidance of the Holy Spirit on the judges of the ecclesiastical courts.... The red mass became the tradition because of the red robes worn by the judges and the red vestments worn by the priests." So lets have a closer look at where we see the red robes and vestments.
TheCommon Fig/Mulemba (of Lemba) Tree
While I have not been able to find a date of origin of the common fig in Africa I was able to find a date on the fig-wasp mutualism originating between 70-90 million years ago as a product of a unique evolutionary event. Therefore, I would think that this variety and its widespread usage among the continent would indicate its antiquity among the human species and would predate the fig variety found in the Middle East about 9,000 years ago. These wasp are unique to other wasp in that they have evolved to specifically pollinate this variety of fig tree in Africa, so they co-evolved.
( Afrikaans ) gewone wurgvy ( Arabic ) jammeiz al abiad ( English ) bark-cloth fig, common wild fig, strangler fig, ( French ) India-laurel fig ( Fula ) bikeshi ( Hausa ) chediya ( Shona ) Gerina ( Spanish ) Jagüey poplar, Arbol Washington, Laurel, ( Swahili ) mrumbapori, mtschamwa ( Tigrigna ) shibaka ( Yoruba ) odan ( Zulu ) umBombe ( Ibinda ) Nsanda.
The fig term comes from the classical Latin "ficus (cultivation of fig) from the Persian word is and the epithet in honor of the collector of a collector of plants among the Europeans, Danish Peter Thonning (1775-1848). The central Africans use the term Mulemba (ficus thonningii) it is described from Ghana in West Africa. It produces white liquid (latex) that is interpreted as mother's milk among the Lemba tribe in central Africa. Lemba stands for the maternal side of an individual. Lem appears in many biblical names, including Lemech related to Hebrew Melech meaning King, and Lemuel. Its leaves are also used for livestock fodder and its bark is used for making bark cloth. The Senegalese and the Igede and Fulani people of Nigeria, Anola, Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia cook the high protein, calcium, potassium, fiber and magnesium leaves of this fig as a vegetable. The common wild fig, Ficus thonningii, is extensively used in African ethnomedicine for treating a number of disease conditions which include diarrhea, urinary tract infections, diabetes mellitus, gonorrhea, respiratory infections, and mental illnesses. Latex rich leaves among these people are preferable because it is known as more potent. The roots are sometimes used as a treatment of "spiritual diseased believed to be caused by evil spirits.
"The fig tree is one of the oldest known fruit trees. Illustrations of fig trees are found on monuments and tombs of ancient Egypt. The Sycamore Fig grew in abundance along the Nile, the region from which Abraham's cattle-herding ancestors came. Zohary and Hopf, authors of Domestication of Plants in the Old World (Oxford University Press), assert that Egypt was "the principal area of sycamore fig development."
"Figs were also a common food source for the Romans. Cato the Elder, in his De Agri Cultura, lists several strains of figs grown at the time he wrote his handbook: the Mariscan, African, Herculanean, Saguntine, and the black Tellanian (De agri cultura, ch. 8)"
Depictions of early people extracting from the fig tree with serpent. One dates to BC, the later AD
The Adventures of Pinochio Story (1883) "No Strings" Personification story of telling lies and troubled child
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| Russian stamp with Buratino The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino (1936) |
Gimmeny Cricket (Green)
"Trouble awaits boys who rebel against their parents and capriciously abandon their paternal home! They will never experience goodness in this world, and sooner or later, they will have to pay for it sourly."- chapter IV
"My boy, do not trust those who promise to make you rich overnight. They are usually either mad or charlatans! Heed my words, and turn back." - chapter XIII
"Now you call me “your dear little cricket”, true? But do you not recall when, to banish me from your house, you threw a mallet at me?"- chapter XXXVI
The Blue Fairy
The Fox & The Cat (con-men)
The Green Fisherman
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| II Pescatore Verde The Adventures of Pinocchio |
He is described as "...so ugly, he looked like a sea monster. Instead of hair, he had on his head a dense clump of green grass; green was the skin on his body, green were his eyes, green was his long beard which drooped downards. He looked like a great lizard erected on its hind legs."
According to Giacomo Maria Prati, The Green Fisherman is one example of the story's parallels with classical mythology, stating that the Fisherman is evocative of the cyclops Polyphemus of Homers Odyssey.
My Trip to Cahokia
The Middle Star of Orions Belt or Red Horn to the Native Americans.
Long-nosed god maskettes AD 1100–1500 Illinois Marine shell
Lightning whelk "Long-nosed god" maskettes, ca. 1150-1450. They have been found in eastern Florida, eastern Oklahoma, and several sites on the upper and middle Mississippi River
The Red Horn character is associated with a Human Effigy Pipe at the University of Arkansas Museum. He is in red material with falcon wings feather cloak. His headress is a copper plate held by a strap with a long braid and a rope of beads. The bread reminds me of the Ninti bread in Africa. He wears earings of the red horn with the long nose.
I also think this Cahokia figure is important to note here because of the similarities of the breast milk and pupil or child like Isis and Horus and Jesus and Mary. I have said in previous blogs I think that this denotes student and teacher, the-one-who-seeks-wisdom and the lady-wisdom who gives her suckle and milk to drink as written in the Book of Thoth. Also found in a mound with astronomical alignment.
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| Woodlands, Mississipian Period 1050-1400, Cahokia, IL |
The Red Horn character was has an underlying theme in its myth of the conferral of ritual kinship upon strangers in a function similar to that of the Calumet Ceremony of historic times.
