The following is just crazy enough that it might make sense…or, at least it seems so to me in my current sick state. (!?!)
Reflecting to an extent on some things that Edward Butler said on Wyrd Ways Radio the other day, and likewise on some things he wrote elsewhere, I wonder if it might be possible to construct a Graeco-Egyptian pantheon (perhaps also incorporating Thracian and other elements as well), at least in a schematic fashion, that deals in particular with a lot of the syncretistic deities that emerge within it in an entirely novel fashion.
Take Athena-Neith here, for example:
With this figure, I’m reminded of some of the Bulgarian Orthodox icons that show Jesus holding up a figure of Mary, as if he is the “father” of her rather than she being his mother. What we have here is Athena-Neith holding up Serapis. While Serapis doesn’t exactly “equal” Zeus, various things seem to go in that direction…but, what if Athena-Neith, in line with a role corresponding to Neith’s creatrix function, was in fact the mother of Serapis (corresponding to the more chthonic side of things, e.g. Osiris and Hades) and Sabazios (corresponding to the more heavenly side of things, e.g. Zeus)? Hmm…
Then, bring in some of the other figures, like Hermanubis and Harpocrates, and of course Isis…and further figures like Karpocrates (a “young Dionysos”-type syncretism)…And, something else I’ve seen recently, which I’ll try to get a scan of or something, are figures of Harpocrates, found in Antinoöpolis, which show him with a rather larger-than-you’d-expect penis (as in “dragging on the ground”): is this a kind of Harpocrates-Priapus, perhaps? And then, there’s Antinous himself, as much a super-syncretistic deity as Sabazios or Serapis, and rather directly related to both, in my opinion…
The whole point of this exercise, thus, being to envision these different syncretistic deities not as mere combinations of what came before, and thus carbon-copy repetitions of them (or, worse yet, as a kind of debasement and sanding out and watering down of the deities), but instead as separate (but related) beings. As Tamara Siuda also said on Wyrd Ways Radio a short while back, with syncretism one deity plus one deity doesn’t equal two, it equals three: each deity individually, and then the resulting combination. So, that means that Hermanubis isn’t just Hermes and Anubis, he’s something else altogether…
Well, in any case: something to keep my illness-addled brain busy for a few minutes, and the hours to come later today.
What do you think?
