In this post, we will look at Egyptian magic and 4 of the most well known Egyptian goddesses, namely, Ma’at, Isis, Sekhmet and Bastet. They are ancient archetypes of the Divine Feminine, whose likeness and power still run through our collective consciousness.
My approach is focused on energy and connection, not so much on ritual (or attempting to recreate ancient Egyptian traditions).
Ma’at
In the ancient Egyptian religion, Ma’at personified justice and balance. Ma’at was the daughter of Sun god Ra. She was also the wife of Thoth, the god of knowledge, wisdom, and the Akashic Records.
On a cosmic level, Ma’at personified Divine law and order, the system on which the universe was built.
It is according to this Divine order that the seasons change, the stars and planets move in the sky, and gods and people exist and interact. In this way, knowing Ma’at was equal to knowing the mechanics of the universe. One who knows Maat knows “how the world works”.
Ma’at gives the wisdom of knowing the cycles and seasons, balance and justice, cause and effect.
The concept of Ma’at is the basis of all ancient Egyptian ideas about the universe and the ethical foundations of day-to-day life. The ultimate purpose of life was to achieve Ma’at.
But the most important aspect of achieving Ma’at was the last judgement, the final account given by the soul in the Hall of Truth (or Hall of Ma’at). In this hall, a soul was judged by 42 high beings, and the heart weighted against the feather of Ma’at.
Later on, this vision of the last judgement and the weighing of the heart would find its way into Abrahamic religions, notably Judaism and Islam. Even in the Christian tradition, we sometimes find archangel Michael holding the scales to weigh the souls on Judgement Day, likely a nod to Anubis in the Egyptian tradition.
The energy of Ma’at is closely connected to the channel that in one modern version of Hermetic Kabbalah is represented by the 11th arcanum, Justice (and the respective Tarot card).
We all carry the archetype of Ma’at within ourselves. It is the balance, the middle path, the weighed and measured movement in accordance with Divine law.
In the podcast episode below, I go more in depth into the concept of Ma’at and her energy. I talk about:
- bees, justice and the sacred feminine;
- the holographic universe;
- how to work with the channel of Ma’at;
- how to know if you have the mark of Ma’at (or if someone else does).
Isis
Isis is probably the most well known and the greatest goddess of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. She is the Great Mother and a gateway into the sacred feminine.
Isis is a healer. She is a comforter. She is a master magician, who resuscitated her beloved Osiris, gathering the pieces of him throughout the land and bringing him back from the dead.
The priestesses of Isis participated in the highly emotional annual rites of grief and mourning for Osiris. They were the grief mistresses of old.
Their processions, a sacred archetypal theater, involved weeping, sobbing, screaming, uncovering their hair and tearing the garments.
Later on, Islamic tradition would forbid women to even appear at funerals, and no sobbing and screaming was to be tolerated. One could say that the rites of Ashura in Shia Islam are an archetypal nod to the ancient tradition of wild mourning — but overall we have lost the art of grief mistressing in the modern world.
These sacred rites of grief opened the possibility of healing and resurrection. By extension, they also signaled the return of fertility and abundance into nature.
A personification of deep yin, Isis was a Moon goddess.
Isis was also the goddess of water, wind, and navigation. An epithet given to the Virgin Mary, Stella Maris (star of the seas), was originally one of the titles of Isis. It was Isis who was originally invoked to assist sailors and travelers, to protect them from the harsh wild seas.
Often shown as a mother sitting on a throne nursing her child, Isis was also the goddess of fertility and marital fidelity. She is at the same time the Virgin Mother. Here, the meaning of “virgin” is ever-young and sovereign unto herself (not sexually untouched, as Mother Mary would later become).
Isis is called the Great Virgin in one of the inscriptions from the Isis Chapel in Seti I’s mortuary temple at Abydos. In Egyptian, this is Hunet Weret (the great maiden). “Hunet” is also the Egyptian name for the pupil of the eye and is connected to the Hermetic treatise known as the Kore Kosmou, the “Virgin of the World,” a dialogue of Isis and Horus.
Isis is our Virgin Mother.
Isis works with feminine beauty, tenderness, fidelity and maternal love — as well as with magic, healing and strength.
As a transmitter of the yin channel, Isis is also closely connected to the underworld and the mysteries of death and resurrection. The yin channel of the tree of life in Hermetic Kabbalah is also a channel into the underworld and the world of qlipoth. Paradoxically, it can also be a channel into the Absolute and the Unmanifest.
Listen to this podcast episode to find out more about Isis and the Great Yin:
Sekhmet
Sekhmet was the patron goddess of the city of Memphis and the wife of Ptah. One of the most feared — and fierce — goddesses in the Egyptian pantheon, she was the goddess of war, embodying the energies of the scorching sun.
Sekhmet was the Sun eye of the Sun god Ra (the other eye was Isis and the eye of the Moon). Sekhmet is the formidable eye of the Sun in zenith, the power of the midday Sun to kill and destroy.
But Sekhmet was also a healer who had the magical power to both bring on an illness and to cure it.
It was at the temples dedicated to Sekhmet that ancient medicine developed. Sekhmet always favored doctors and surgeons, and in the old days the priests of Sekhmet were also the best doctors around.
Even today, many doctors, and especially surgeons, still carry the energies of Sekhmet in their biofield.
It seems Sekhmet favored especially the precision and power of the surgical profession. A surgeon, like herself, could potentially both kill and give life. A surgeon could restore health by removing an inflamed or otherwise imbalanced part of the body — but even today a surgery is not a walk in the park, and it was much less so in the days of Sekhmet.
Sekhmet is (almost) a pure fire element, able to bring power and passion into a stagnant project or situation.
We connect with Sekhmet to work with the energies of the 15th and 17th arcana of the Hermetic tree of life, i.e., letting go of attachments and the power of healing respectively (represented by Tarot cards The Devil and The Star in the tradition I work with).
Bastet and the Cat Goddesses
In the Egyptian magical pantheon, the most famous cat goddess is Bast, or Bastet. She is the goddess of home, family, childbirth — and the patron of luxury and comfort.
Bastet had both a lunar and a solar side. The lunar Pasht was the keeper of the left-hand path, darker and more vengeful. Some people also connect Pasht with Sekhmet and other lion goddesses.
But the solar Bast is the epitome of hygge, the Scandinavian art of taking it easy in a comfortable home.
Bast is the one who takes you over when you dance like no one is watching, when you make yourself beautiful because you want to embody harmony, when you dress in your finest clothes because you feel like it.
Bast is the soft harmonious voice of a healer, she is the music of heavenly harmony, she is a wise enchantress in a body of a young maiden.
Magnetism and Feminine Power
Most of these “dark goddesses” are dark because they are the embodiment of magnetism, the yin power of attraction, and an art many of us have had to learn on our path to wholeness,
As women, we have often been conditioned to be loving, nurturing and radiant. We thought if we did everything right and were good girls, then things would work out for us. And gifted with high energetic sensitivity, we only ended up overwhelmed and exhausted.
The program we were imprinted with kept telling us that all we had to do to was to be a good girl. And a better girl. And a better girl still. Want people to like you? Like them! Want support? Support everyone! Want to heal the pain? Do a lot of practices and clearings and meditate for hours, and you will find peace.
Yet it is the feminine, the yin, that has the power of boundaries, containers, darkness, descent and dissolution. A potentially destructive power. But without this power of deep dark yin, we cannot fully embody the feminine.
The feminine is powerful precisely because it holds these dualities. Life and death, constriction and expansion, rise and fall. Magnetism and radiance.
The feminine does not move in straight lines — it goes in circles and spirals. The womb that gives life, also destroys. And there is deep magic in that.
