Part of the beauteous wonders of life is its divine grace of communications.
Flowing from person to person, from persons to bygone eras, persons to cosmos, and vice versa, effortlessly. By reason of these clustered florets, these diaphanous, blessed networks of communications, flight is attained.
Common human methods for the transit of magical communications are those such as reading, writing, interpreting, recounting, teaching, preaching, translating-- the ideas, words, techniques, symbols of the earliest ancient traditions, religions, and conceptions of the relationship of self from the past into the present.
In his wonderful autobiography, THE ELOQUENCE OF THE SCRIBES, Ayi Kwei Armah expedites this transition. He has studied these traditions and he has translated them to us, while placing them precisely in relational-connected chronological, theological, epistemological, technical, contexts.
He writes:
"Ancient Egyptian literature posits the birth of divinity out of the primal matter of the universe, imagined as containing all potential. Emergent divinity then organizes existing matter and potential into distinguishable aspects of the cosmos: space, stars, water , air, land, people, plants, animals. The texts show the relationship between divinity and primal matter as parental, enduring , and memorable . They show the relationship between divinity as organizer, on the one hand, and humanity, flora, fauna, and land, as organized reality, on the other hand, under the same familial angle. The universe thus described works regularly if reciprocal connections between its various parts are respected...
"A good practical illustration of the principle of connectedness was the coming of the Nile floods. A natural reality on which life in Egypt depended, it was interpreted as a consequence of the maintenance of reciprocal connections between the various levels of being at play in the universe. Failure of the fecundating inundation , a life-threatening malfunction , was seen as a result of negligence. The harm done had to be repaired in order to restore the broken balances of life. This is the concept informing the inscription on the 'Famine Stele' of the 3rd Dynasty king Djoser:
"'My heart was in such great distress because for seven years the Nile has not come on time. Grain was scarce, seed had dried out, all foodstuffs were in short supply... The infant was in tears , the young man crestfallen; old men sat cross-legged on the ground, their hearts low... Then I took heart by turning to the past, and questioned a man among the staff of Ibis, the chief lector-priest Imhotep: "From what place does the Nile spring?" I asked him. "What god rests there, so that he might help me? (Obenga 2004, p.502)'...
"This representative text, in spirit much like several others involving humans and spirits in relationships moving from balance through rupture to crises and back to balance--provided the disastrogenic injustice is righted. Let us consider its implications. As long as cosmic interconnections are maintained in a state of balance and justice, life flows smoothly. When things go wrong, the reason is not arbitrary chance but some cause, which may be hidden at first, but is ultimately knowable . In times of crisis the positive role of knowledgeable persons in society is to find out what the causes of malfunction are, and to correct them by reestablishing lost balances. In the story cited, the prototypical positive person is Imhotep, the scribe, the architect and sage."
P. 214-216 (2006)
