Dawn

The Creation of All there Is

As with all great religions, it all starts where It All Starts. At the beginning of time.

This little myth is mainly based off of the Egyptian Heliopolitan creation myth. I changed the name of Atum to Amun and the ordering of what happens and when. I’ve also included alot of Greek deities and concepts. The second main inspiration is the Hermetic text Poimandres which is the most beautiful religious text I’ve ever laid eyes upon.

This text of mine is basically just a reworking of Poimandres but from the perspective of The All Mind as Amun, and with a more Egyptian flavor to it. I also decreased the serious weight Poimandres puts on the “fall” of Man into Matter, and changed the tone as more of an accepted loving embrace of that “fall” in the form of the dismemberment myth of Zagreus.

I will include pictures of the text and at the bottom of the picture, the actual text. Some words and names in the text are in Greek, but i’ve included the transliteration next to the words. I will also include footnotes explaining certain things as best as I can. I highly recommend that you read through the text in its entirety first and then go on reading it with the footnotes.

Before all time,

There was Νούς (Nous).¹

Mind of My Mind stretched eternally, as the Nun—Sea of Χάος (Chaos),

Where all forms of what was to be lay hidden.

Hidden, were the rays of the Sun. The Heavens and the Earth.

Hidden, was the potter's wheel.²

Hidden, were the eyes that would look from within and without at the Heart's Creation.

Hidden is My very nature, from beginning to end.³

Within the Heart of the living Nun, a Lotus blossomed.

And upon it, I fashioned the Temple of My Soul.⁴

For I was yet without form,

Existing only as the endless Sea of Nun

And the boundless Light beneath and behind it.⁵

I took the first spark of Creation, Φάνης (Phanes)⁶

The Essence of The Lotus

And with it, fashioned the First of Forms.

My Temple took the form of the primordial Ram, Amun.⁷

I knew myself now as The All, owning, and Being everything.

And yet, I longed for Creation.

I longed to give Form to all that could Be.

My very Longing awakened Creation,

For Longing and Creation are One.⁸

And in My Longing, I beheld all that would come to Be,

And I was glad in the vision of it.

So I spoke the Word,⁹

The Word that parted the waters,

The Word that drew out My Longing.

Through what the Heart plans and Tongue commands,

The first Neteru¹⁰ came into Being.

I raised them out of the watery mass,

Out of inactivity.

They came forth as The Two Pillars, Shu and Tefnut.

Shu, born of Light, carried the Breath of Clarity,

The first winds that would part the darkness.

Tefnut, born of Chaos, carried the waters of life,

The fertile essence from which all would grow.¹¹

The One became Two, and together

The Three became the foundations of Being.

And yet still, all remained within Me, One.¹²

From the depths of the Nun,

The First Mound emerged,

The sacred Pyramid of κόσμος (Cosmos),

The first Dry Land.¹³

Its corners were the beings,

Whom by coming into being,

Brought forth Being itself.

And yet, in every moment,

The spark of that first coming into Being remains,

For what begins in Eternity never ceases to begin.¹⁴

In the stillness before all things,

I spoke the name of My Soul Bird, Bennu.¹⁵

The waters parted once more, as The Hill rose further on high,

Fanned by the wings of Bennu who now soared over the endless Nun.

And with a cry that echoes through all time, piercing through the depths of Chaos,

Bennu laid her egg, which was the Lotus bud of Creation.

The waters shuddered

As the Lotus blossomed, Its petals unfolding into the First Dawn,

From Its radiant yolk, a flaming disc rose to the heavens

And Ra emerged.¹⁶

I beheld Ra, Light of My Light,

And drew Him into My embrace.

Together, We merged as One— Amun-Ra.

The Union of the Hidden and the Revealed.

Through Our Light, the darkness was dispelled,

And the Mound stood bathed in radiance,

Its surface alive with the golden warmth of Being.¹⁷

Shu and Tefnut, My firstborn,

Danced upon the Mound in unity and embrace.

Through their movement, the heavens and the earth began to take shape.

Together, they brought forth Geb, the Earth,

And Nut, the Sky.

They were bound in eternal embrace,

Until Shu, with His breath of clarity, parted them,

So that Life could flourish in the space between.¹⁸

As the Cosmos took form,

I gazed once more into the waters of Nun,

And in their depths, My reflection was revealed to Me—

A Bull.

In the perfection of that reflection,

I saw the One who would carry My Essence into Creation.

He was My Beloved, My Son,

The embodiment of My boundless joy and longing—

Διόνυσος-Ζαγρέας (Dionysos-Zagreus)¹⁹

Moved continuously by Love, He gazed into the waters,

Which now began mingling with the Mound.

And Longing awakened within Him.²⁰

For in beholding a form like unto Himself existing in the waters,

He loved it and willed to live in it,

To taste and know the fullness of Being.

With Will came Act.

And He embraced the Nun as if they were lovers—

A union born of Longing, of Love.

For Love and Longing calls all things to join themselves unto themselves,

To bridge the infinite and the finite,

The eternal and the fleeting.²¹

Their embrace pulled His being apart,²²

As the current of the waters entered His body.

But this He allowed willingly,

For He wished to spread through all corners of the Mound.

As the waters mixed with His blood,

The Holy Wine poured forth to all parts of the Dry Land,²³

Infusing all things with the spark of My Being.

Even in His fragmentation, He remains whole,

For no part of Him is ever truly apart from Me.

And I am All.

Through Him, the Cosmos became alive,

No longer just potential

But a reflection of My Mind and Longing

Saturated with the joy and ecstasy of Existence.²⁴

The stars are His laughter,

The rivers His flowing tears,

And the fruits of the earth, the gifts of His boundless love.

Thus, My Son became the Heart of Creation.

All the offspring of My Longing²⁵ brought offerings to Him,

Bowing in reverence.

Yet He told them, "Stand.

For one cannot dance through Being while on one's knees."²⁶

This is His nature,

Ελευθέριος (Eleutherios), Liberator.

For though He binds all things together,

He is yet Λυαῖος (Lyaios), the οne who loosens bonds.

And so, the order of the Cosmos took form.

The eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth began.

And I watched,

Both within and beyond,

As all I had envisioned unfolded.

For though I am Source,

I am also Witness,

I am Life and Light.

I am you and you are I,

And wheresoever you may be

I am there

In all am I scattered

And whencesoever you may will it,

You may gather Me

And gathering Me

You gather yourself.²⁷

²⁸

1. Nous is usually translated as Mind. Though this definition is often lacking in the proper context and true definition of the word, it is the one I use in this myth for simplicity’s sake. Other definitions can be “thought”, “intelligence”, “perception”. The other defintion of the word that works best in the context of this myth would be “awareness”. The Eternal Mind becoming aware of itself is what kickstarts Creation.

Think of when you yourself sit and meditate and become aware of your being. This action immediately creates a sense that there is someone outside of you looking at you in awareness. This is what is meant by “The One, Became Two”. The original Two being “the endless Sea of Nun. And the boundless Light beneath and behind it.”

2. Khnum 𓎸𓅱𓀭 hnmw, the Egyptian god responsible for creating the bodies of humans, and in some cases all the forms that were to inhabit the material Cosmos. He did so upon a potter’s wheel, creating everything from clay.

3. The definition of the name Amun, ꞽmn 𓇋𓏠𓈖 means something like “hidden”. His nature as a God is that He is simoultaneously Hidden yet present in all Creation. Like the wind, like air, you can’t see Him but you can feel Him.

4. “Temple of My Soul” means manifested form or “body”. Body, not in the sense of material body (for there was no material yet), but in the sense that the whole Being of Amun focused onto one point of intelligible Being. Simoultaneously being that form but also being everything else that exists at the same time.

5. See second part of footnote 1. The Primordial Waters of Nun is the feminine Pure potential for Being, the receiving party of Creation. It draws inwards, and receives all things from Light in order to turn it into beings and forms. It is Chaos, darkness, the womb of time and space who through her pregnancy gives birth to All Things. The Great Mother.

The Light is the masculine creative spark who’s nature is to create constantly and give unto the Nun. It goes forwards and outwards, the one who impregates. Orderer of forms. The Divine Logos. It gives without expecting to receive anything because it already has everything.

We have to keep in mind that when dealing with philosophical concepts such as these we have to throw our own familiar conceptions of terms such as “feminine”, “chaos”, “darkness”, “light”, “good” and “evil” out the window. There is nothing familiar here, we simply use familiar words to try and find our way in a completely unfamiliar space such as the Creation of the universe. We cannot get political. You can’t get mad because I say that the feminine is darkness and chaos while the masculine is light and order. If you feel petty emotions come up and you start to get political, then you are not ready to truly grasp the deeper meaning of philosophical and religious texts.

The same goes for people who inherently assume that because matter, Nun, the feminine only receives and gives nothing in return, that it is bad in the traditional sense of the word. Or that because Light, the masculine only gives and does not expect to receive anything, that it is good, again, in the traditional sense of the word. And then these people try to only strive towards the Light while dismissing the Dark. The Corpus Hermeticum does use the word Good for God because He gives without receiving and the word “evil” for matter and Cosmos because it is passible, subject to change. But again, we have to forget about what we think evil and Good mean in the traditional sense because these are simply the best words we have in the English language to try and explain Greek terms and words that have alot more depth to them than English words could ever even come close to.

We need to understand that Light and Dark, Good and Evil are both part of our Creator, Amun. Both are necessary for Creation, giver gives only and receiver receives only and the Creator is both the one who is both of them and beyond them at the same time, as He creates through them.

6. Phanes, or Protogonos is a Primordial Greek God in Orphic myths. He was born at the beginning of Creation, emerging from the Cosmic (Orphic) egg. In Egyptian myths, the Lotus and the Egg were often intertwined, the bud of the Lotus being an egg from which sprang amongst other things, Ra the Sun God, or Atum the creator God Himself. In my myth, I wanted to somehow convey that Phanes and the egg are one. Phanes is the creative spark of the Lotus itself, the first Thing that sprang forth within the infinite sea of Nun. Amun having formed His Form upon the Lotus does mean that He did emerge from the Lotus, as in the traditional ancient myths of Atum. But He was also already present within Creation, He was already the Nun and Light and Phanes and The Lotus. But He needed a Form first in order to truly kickstart Creation.

7. Amun was often depicted as a ram, a ram-headed man or a ram sphinx.

8. I wanted to put enphasis on Longing being an important factor within Creation. How can a Being that has everything Long for something? This is one of the many paradoxes of Creation itself. Due to lack of space, I won’t be going into detail on what Longing truly means but I recommend you read Peter Kingsley’s little article here https://peterkingsley.org/wp-content/uploads/KingsleysLonging.pdf to perhaps maybe grasp some of it.

9. The Word is in this case the greek concept of Logos λόγος. The reason why I chose not to include the actual Greek word Logos in the text is to avoid too much complication. One could research this concept for a whole year and still not even come close to understanding its intricacies. Nonetheless, I will include some of its definitions in English: “word”, “reason” “discourse”. It is where we get our word “logic” from and also “logo” such as a McDonald’s logo. In this specific text I use its definition as “spoken word”, the Creator God speaks the Universe into existence.

“In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” - John 1:1

10. Neteru or Netjeru was the word for gods in Egypt.

11. see footnote 5 for explanation on Light and Nun. Shu is the embodiment of Light and Tefnut the embodiment of Nun, as the ram is the embodiment of Amun. In future texts, I may use the name of the Greek Apollo for Shu and Aphodite for Tefnut.

12. A reminder that even with the apparent rise of multiplicity and seperation, all is still One with Amun. Though there are several beings and creatures and things in the universe. There truly is only One Thing, and that is Amun. This religion is quite monistic but also paradoxically it celebrates The One by honoring its multiplicity. There will be many more such paradoxes going forward.

13. The Mound, or Benben in Egyptian cosmology is a pyramid like structure which was the first dry piece of land on the waters of Nun where the creator God could start to create life. The pyramids in Egypt were said to be topped by a small pyramidion which represented this Mound. I have a whole musical project called The First Mound, on its Instagram profile https://www.instagram.com/the_first_mound/ you can read the first few posts to learn more about this concept. However, within this religion the First Mound is simply put, the Cosmos. Amun, using the creative spark of Shu and the potential energy of Tefnut brought forth The Mound as the first Material plane.

14. Another reminder of Oneness. Though this time it’s more about time. Our perception of reality and time is linear, everything goes straight ftom beginning to end. But the main point of this reminder is that Amun is Eternal, time on “His plane of existence” is nonexisting. God is constantly creating the world. Every single instant, the Creation of the Universe is being done. Though the text is written mostly in the past tense, it should be written in the present tense, because it is happening right now. Always and forever now, it’s all there is.

15. Bennu is a phoenix like bird that in some myths, layed the first egg from which Atum emerged, and in others he"/she layed the egg from which the Sun emerged. In another myth, her cry or shriek pierced the stillness of the nun and the movement of the waters kickstarted Creation.

16. Egyptian Sun God

17. The union of Amun and Ra and the “dispelling of darkness” is basically The Big Bang written in a mythological sense. The start of the material realm.

18. In Egyptian myth, Geb and Nut conceived the five star children Osiris, Isis, Nepthys, Sutekh (Set) and Horus the Elder. But they could not be born due to Geb and Nut staying perpetually embraced. Shu, came between them and raised Nut to become the night sky, leading to the couple only being able to touch at the very tips of their toes and fingers for the rest of eternity.

In this myth, Geb and Nut are not to be taken literally as the earth and sky but as planets (Geb) and space (Nut).

19. This idea comes from the idea of The Cosmic Man in the Hermetic text Poimandres. In that text, God brought forth Man (at this time still both male and female) whom He created in His image (a very biblical idea). God fell in love with His creation that reflected His own form, and gave him all His powers. Eventuall this Cosmic Man descended upon the waters of Nature and seeing His reflection, fell in love with it due to it being the Image of God. He willed to live in it and descended into material forever being bound to it. This is why in Hermetic philosophy, humans are both divinely immortal, due to the Divine Man and material, subject to death, due to Nature being succeptible to death.

20. Amun, the Ram, Aries, looking into the waters saw his reflection as His Son, The Bull, Taurus. The Zodiacal sign following Aries. Dionysos was often depicted as a bull. Amun’s creative power immediately creates Dionysos’ being within the waters, from mere reflection to Being. Dionysos then looking back at Amun; who is in turn Dionysos’ reflection, fell in Love with this image due to it being the image of God. This is inspired by the myth of baby Zagreus being lured by the Titans into a trap by showing Zagreus a mirror which He was infatuated by.

The water of the Nun were now mingling with the Mound, so the potential energy for Being was now upon the Mound, making it ready and ripe for Creation.

21. Once again, emphasis on Longing. I wanted to paint a more “positive” image of the descent of man into material than I feel most Hermetic texts do.

22. Reflection of the Zagreus myth, where the Titans tore His body apart and ate it, only leaving His heart. From His heart, Dionysos was eventually created, and Zeus enacting revenge killed the titans with his lightning. From the ashes of the bodies of Titans now full of the body of Zagreus, humanity was created. Again this shows that humans are both partly Divine (from Zagreus) and Evil, or material (from the Titans).

23. Dionysos was a wine god after all, wine being His blood in some myths.

24. In Karl Kerenyi’s book, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructable Life, he puts forward an idea that Dionysos is a representation of ζωη (zoe), the Greek concept of indestructible life, which he distinguishes from βίος (bios), finite life. In my myth, this is reflected; Dionysos is the very spark of life. You could say, the Spirit which animates our bodies. Or our soul, which is always a part of God, due to it being a part of His Reflection.

25. The Netjeru, the other gods such as Osiris, Isis etc.

26. Dionysos does not ask for worship by submission, kneeling and being ultra pious. He asks for worship through dance, through movement, through a pure enjoyment of the gifts of life. While everything is still, because Amun is One and all there is, there is nothing for Him to move in because He is One. We need to see the blessing of the illusion of movement, the gift of life being that of the sense of seperation so that we may ultimately rejoice once more when we are reunited with Oneness. This is the worship He asks for, that we “dance through Being”.

27. This is from the so called Gospel of Eve: “I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself.”

28. The view of this religion or myth is monistic at its basis. Monism is a very touchy subject, no one likes it except those that have experienced it first hand. Even the most devout and radical monotheists such as Muslims do not like it because it is too radical and borders on “shirk”. This is why most Muslims dismiss Sufism, especially the more radical monistic Sufi movements.

Obviously, polytheists who want to believe that each and every god is a deity of its own, won’t like monism either. It’s very hard to like or even believe the idea that there is only one thing in all of existence. And yet if you have ever experienced Divine Oneness/Unity, whether it was through usage of Entheogens or mystical practice, then you have felt this truth. These states of Oneness are a remembrance or reminder of this Unity, but the Unity is not limited to these states and experiences. It is always around us, we are always One, not only when we take LSD or meditate.

We but have to look to Parmenides, the so called father of logic. The literal inventor of logic in the west, used said logic to prove that if there truly existed two seperate things in the universe; reality would fall apart. There can only be one thing. And yet he still demonstrated this idea through the use of a poem that included gods in the multiple.

Monism doesn’t factor out the idea of many different gods with their own motivations or goals. Everything exists within the All. All wouldn’t be All without all and everything existing. The Egyptians, who are arguably the most polytheistic culture in the ancient days knew this. It was often said that there was a Great God “notjer a’ah” who ruled over and created all other gods out of Himself. Even in the Hindu tradition you have the concept of Brahman, which is the same thing.

In my religious ideas, I try to emphasise that though everything is still, and of One Thing; we have still been given a gift. This gift is the illusion of seperation, and though it may be an illusion. The illusion is real to us, and so it is our duty to drink the illusion to the dregs. But I will go more into this in later texts.