When reviewing ancient Egyptian mythology, it is important to realize that ancient Egypt is over six thousand years old. If you consider how Christianity, its beliefs, and practices have changed in a mere seventeen hundred years, imagine how any belief system can alter over three times that amount of time.

In addition, Egyptian hieroglyphic translations were mere guesses before the Rosetta Stone, which was only discovered in 1798. Most of what we know about ancient Egypt has been revealed since then.

One belief we know is that according to their core myths, ancient Egyptians believed that life was a continuous war between Isfet, chaos, and Maat, order. The pharaoh’s duty was to create order in the place of chaos, which he (or she) did by building temples, making offerings, dispensing justice, and defending borders. (The word pharaoh comes from the Egyptian pero and means “great house.”)

The Egyptian god Ra, who personified the intense noon-day sun, was the senior god in the Egyptian pantheon. Likely, he followed the same arc as did the sky and sun gods of other civilizations: they started as leaders and father figures before they were elevated to a more remote and celestial role, while other deities took the place of the original’s more worldly and immediate functions.

The story of the god Ra follows a similar trajectory. He is thought to have been the first pharaoh before he grew old and weary and relinquished his throne. From there, he ascended into the skies, where he would pass across the heavens each day in his solar barque. All pharaohs who came after derived their power and their mandate to rule from the belief that they were the personification of the god on Earth. The pharaoh was, for this reason, divine.

The ancient Egyptians interacted with as many as 1,500 other deities who controlled specific natural forces. The pharaoh was a vital intermediary and was expected to intercede on the people’s behalf.

Order was everything in ancient Egypt, and festivals were an integral part of daily life. According to Herodotus, some involved hundreds of thousands of people. Such events acted as a social lubricant and a means to relieve social stress. They also helped shape the idea that it was only through hierarchy, tradition, and order that Egypt could survive the forces of chaos.

For example, there is an ancient Egyptian legend that, at one time, mankind decided to overthrow the authority of Ra. According to the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra used his right eye as a weapon to punish those who rebelled by sending it out in the form of the lioness goddess Sekhmet to destroy mankind. This is the same Sekhmet that Alice’s diary references in the Eye of the Moon, in which she describes the annual Sekhmet festival—a raucous affair in which the participants drink themselves into oblivion.

The right eye of Ra was also called the Eye of the Sun. It functioned as the feminine counterpart to the male, Ra, and was a violent, independent force searching for and directed against the enemies of order.

The left eye of Ra was called the Eye of Horus and was referred to as the Eye of the Moon. Its history is an amalgamation of many myths and stories that have become hopelessly entangled.

To be clear, Ra had two eyes: the Eye of Horus (the left eye) and the Eye of Ra (the right eye).

Ra’s left eye, the Eye of Horus, derives its name from the Osiris myth.

The story goes like this. Set, the bad boy of ancient Egypt, usurps the throne from his brother Osiris and chops his brother’s body into many pieces. Isis, Osiris’s sister and wife, restores the body of Osiris allowing her to posthumously conceive their child, Horus. Horus grows up and becomes a rival for the throne. During the battle between Horus and his uncle Set, Horus loses an eye which is found and returned to him by another deity. Rather than keeping it to restore his own sight, Horus offers the eye to his father, Osiris. This gift acts as a miraculous revitalizing force and helps sustain and preserve Osiris in the afterlife. The Osiris Myth forms the basis for a multitude of ancient Egyptian beliefs, such as life after death, mummification, books of the dead, and many others.

Because of its restorative power, the Eye of Horus took on healing and protective functions and became a personification of the moon, which waxes and wanes like health and illness. Although the eye’s main function was preservation, what it really did was far more significant—the eye acted to restore order and balance.

In my first novel, the Eye of the Moon, Alice (the left eye) restores balance and order when placed in opposition and next to the Eye of Ra (Maw), the right eye. Alice performs this function by ceding Percy the estate of Rhinebeck and all the treasures it contains as a check against the power of Maw (the Eye of Ra) so that balance and order are restored and maintained. This is why the novel and the series have that title.

Since many readers have expressed an interest in the myths and practices of ancient Egypt and their relevance to the novels, I will be writing more about them in future blogs.