Return of the Storm God - Appendix IX: Return of the Djedi - The Westcar Story (revised 5-11-25)
The modern Star Wars myth is ancient and entirely Egyptian - revealing much about the history of Egypt
Preface
Much like the modern films Star Wars or West Side Story - itself a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which in turn descends from the Greek tale of Pyramus and Thisbe - the ancient Egyptian scribes were among the first to employ the familiar narrative device we now call ‘once upon a time.’ These ‘tales of yore’ offered more than amusement; they were teaching instruments through which cosmology, morality, and lineage could be conveyed in allegorical form. The Westcar Papyrus is the archetype of that tradition. It translates living cosmological principles into dramatic story, a form that later cultures would recognise as myth or sacred history. See the translations here: Papyrus Westcar – The Story
Within Egypt this narrative art had clear purpose. Each tale echoed the divine pattern of Isis, Osiris, and Horus - the cycle of loss, restoration, and renewal that expressed the natural law of return. Through such parables, the Egyptians externalised their observation of natural processes: light reborn after darkness, the seed quickened in the earth, the king renewed through death and succession. What later became national folklore - the Arthurian romances, the Eddic lays, the Vedic epics, and eventually the cinematic sagas of our own time - descends from the same root method: re-telling the universal drama of polarity and reunion in the idiom of each age.
As we have illustrated throughout this work, this same narrative structure appears again in the formation of the Christian Bible. It is a compilation of older tales - stories of former ages - refashioned into a sequence of episodes designed to convey theological doctrine in the guise of history. Yet this process did not begin with the Church. The tendency to rework myth for political and priestly ends was already visible in Egypt itself. By the time the Westcar tales were copied, the age of powerful temple hierarchies had long begun, and the line between revelation and persuasion was no longer clear. Whether the authors of such tales sought merely to instruct or to manipulate is difficult to prove, but the signs of calculated narrative shaping are present. The Westcar Papyrus thus stands not only as the prototype of the world’s sacred storytelling, but also as an early example of how myth could be used - consciously or otherwise - to consolidate belief and authority.
This appendix examines that lineage through one clear lens. It focuses on the parallels between the Westcar narrative and the modern myth of Star Wars, in which the archetypes of Egypt re-emerge almost intact: the living pillar, the hidden field, the father and son, the eternal struggle between order and chaos. Westcar’s tale of yore becomes a ‘once upon a time’, tale, now rendered as ‘In a galaxy far, far away.’ (The Romeo and Juliet current - the hieros gamos of divided lovers - we address elsewhere.) Here we follow instead the return of the Djedi: the living measure reborn in contemporary myth, carrying forward the same geometry of light, proportion, and rebirth that first took form beside the Nile.
Interestingly, not only are the globally familiar archetypes of our own era foreshadowed within the Westcar Papyrus - in figures recognisable today as the proto-Star Wars characters - but so too is another modern icon: Medjed, the ghostly figure that has become a cult symbol in contemporary Japanese art and animation. His veiled form, reimagined across millennia, is now celebrated by the same youth culture that absorbs its mythic heritage through screens rather than temple walls. The persistence of this image reminds us that the past continually re-emerges within the present, as though demanding recognition and restoration. Myth does not die; it transforms, carrying its ancient signal forward until its meaning is again perceived.
Introduction – The Westcar Papyrus and its Setting
Among the surviving Egyptian texts, few are as revealing as the Westcar Papyrus (P. Berlin 3033). Copied in hieratic during the Second Intermediate Period, around 1600 BCE, it preserves a cycle of wonder-stories set a thousand years earlier in the court of Pharaoh Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid. The manuscript was discovered in fragments in the nineteenth century and named after its first European owner, Henry Westcar.
The work is not a royal chronicle but a sequence of tales told by Khufu’s sons and courtiers to entertain the king. Each episode recounts an act of marvellous skill or divine intervention performed by a wise man or priest. The final story - by far the most important - introduces an aged magician called Djedi, said to be 110 years old, who possesses the secret of restoring life and who alone knows the ‘number of the hidden chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth.’ Summoned before Khufu, Djedi performs feats of restoration and animal control, yet refuses to reveal the measure itself, declaring that the mystery will belong instead to three unborn sons of a priestess at Heliopolis. Those children, he foretells, will become the first kings of a new dynasty.
Intended, it is claimed, to distinguish the Westcar Djedi from a historical prince of the same name, some translators render the magician’s name as Dedi. Yet the supposed need for this distinction is itself suspicious. The Westcar narrative places its Djedi in a story whose principal figure is the uncle of the historical prince, whose grandfather was another significant pyramid building pharaoh - Sneferu - suggesting that the two were never meant to be separated. The overlap hints that the tale preserves genuine ancestral memory veiled in mythic form - a blending of the historical and the archetypal that typifies Egyptian storytelling. To divide the magician from the prince is to miss the point: the text deliberately conflates the living man with the archetype of wisdom, the Djed incarnate in human form. The history of Egypt from Khufu is the beginning of a national religion overseen and inherited by Khufu’s successors.
To modern Egyptology the papyrus is prized as one of the earliest examples of narrative prose, but its deeper value lies in what it records of Egypt’s shifting worldview. Beneath its storytelling surface runs a coded account of a real historical transition: the passing of cosmic authority from the pyramid-builders of the Fourth Dynasty to the solar priesthood of the Fifth. In that sense it is the earliest written reflection on the problem that defines all subsequent religion - the movement of living knowledge from natural science and kingship into institution and doctrine.
For the present study, Westcar is far more than a curiosity of ancient literature. It is a miniature of the entire Egyptian cosmology reduced to parable form, preserving in character and image the essential elements of the Djed - the pillar of stability - and its living counterpart, the Djedi. Through this single tale we glimpse how myth begins: a record of real principles translated into story, carried forward as a vessel of proportion and renewal.
Part 1 – The Hidden Chamber of Light
The Westcar tale sits where the pyramid horizon becomes a saga. In the papyrus, the king Khufu seeks the ‘number of the secret chambers of Thoth’ so that he may fashion his horizon upon that measure. He summons an aged wonder-worker named Djedi, famed for restoration and uncanny control over life-signs, who answers not with a count but with a place: a flint box in a sanctuary at Heliopolis that contains the archive of the measure. The tale closes by deferring actual opening to three unborn sons of a priestess – a dynastic and priestly succession that transfers custody of the measure from the king’s immediate will to a priestly lineage. This is the narrative kernel through which the Old Kingdom’s lived science of proportion becomes transmitted forward in myth.
Read as typology rather than anecdote, the Westcar episode names three functional poles that recur across Egyptian cosmology and later cultural re-workings:
Khufu – the axis of form; the sovereign who wishes to embody the horizon and fix the measure in stone. His undertaking represents the moment when natural observation and artisanal knowledge are elaborated into monumental form.
Djedi – the living Djed; the sage whose competence is resurrection, repair, and custodianship of secret measure. He embodies the operative skill of initiation – what the initiates called Hu and Sia, the sounding and seeing operations of field-work. The story intends Djedi as exemplar of restraint: he knows how, but not when it is right for the knowledge to be used.
Medjed – the veiled field-form; the hidden axis within the chamber, the active principle that animates measure. In our reconstruction Medjed is not an agent of wrath but the living wick and toroidal field that quickens form into life. As such he is the interior principle of Khufu’s sealed architecture: the unseen that permits visible order to function.
This threefold is the simple grammar: form seeks measure – measure is stewarded by living skill – living skill points to a hidden field. The Westcar tale preserves that grammar in story-form. The enigmatic flint box at Heliopolis, at the centre of Djedi’s tale, is not a mere box of curiosities but a mnemonic device: an archive of measure to be opened only by proper succession. The narrative therefore encodes two linked lessons. First, knowledge of measure is a custodial function that requires initiation and social placement. Second, the hidden field is real and must be respected: the rightness of a measure is revealed in a context of alignment, not possession. This is about masonry as a practical art and craft, and Masonry as an initiatic cult.
We have shown that the Egyptians at a very early stage, along with the Mesopotamians, were highly advanced mathematicians who encoded ratio within their works, especially their architecture. The Pythagorean ratios, phi, and the 3–4–5 triangles appear throughout the Great Pyramid’s design. The King’s Chamber is a bare room containing only the ‘sarcophagus.’ Astonishingly, the coffer can be used as a unit of measure to fill the chamber in a 6 × 5 arrangement, producing a seventh row of half-sarcophagi. The resulting volume of the whole structure equals 137.5 units of sarcophagi and partial sarcophagi. That number is remarkable, for 137.5 degrees is the circle’s golden angle - the complement of phi that governs the spirals of shells, plants, galaxies, and the orbital resonance of electrons. The chamber therefore embodies the golden ratio itself - the junction of form and flow, stone and air, Isis and Osiris. Within the sarcophagus the volume of air equals the volume of stone: half solid, half void, half form and half fluid. This corresponds exactly to the axial complete form revealed through our reconstruction, where Isis represents fluid and breath and Osiris represents form.
Whether the finer alignments identified by modern analysts such as Alan Green were consciously calculated at the design stage or arose naturally from the geometry of the pyramid form remains uncertain. It is difficult to imagine such pre-planned precision with the tools of the age, yet the deliberate use of simpler harmonic proportions - such as the 3-4-5 triangle and the carefully angled internal shafts - was entirely within the capability of the builders. The deeper ratios that later appear to approximate constants like 137 or φ are more likely inherent consequences of those basic harmonics than deliberate encodings. What matters is that subsequent generations recognised and revered these underlying patterns: by the time of the Djedi tale, Egyptian initiates already viewed the Great Pyramid as a divine instrument of measure, the “flint box” embodying the sacred number and the laws of creation. Later cultures, from the Pythagoreans to the Elizabethans, continued to echo the same geometric harmonies in their own symbolic and literary forms.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that Djedi (and possibly the historical Prince Djedi) - the miracle-performing magician - was an initiate of the Masonic-priestly guild and that the King’s Chamber of Khufu, and by extension the Great Pyramid itself, is the true subject of the Westcar tale. The sarcophagus is the ‘flint box’ that holds the mysteries. Egyptian initiatory science included Pythagorean mathematics and ratio thousands of years before the historical Pythagoras, whose name was later given to what was already ancient knowledge. The Veil of Isis is the invisible hidden nature of the goddess as phi – the ratio behind the measure, the me of the Djed or Medjed. The field was thus known, measured, and embodied.
The same initiatory ratios resurface in later literature. Shakespeare’s First Folio of Sonnets encodes the same geometrical proportions in its frontispiece and within the poems, matching the dimensions of the Great Pyramid. Alan Green – pianist, composer, author, and Shakespeare scholar – has demonstrated these correspondences in his research on the Shakespearean codes and their relation to the pyramid.
Sonnet 17 contains the following lines:
Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage.
And stretchèd miter of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice - in it and in my rhyme.
Here we find Isis hidden – she who conceals life, the essence of the goddess, and ‘shows not half.’ Only form is seen; the ratio, the air, remains unseen. Isis veiled and hidden in number. The ‘beauty of your eyes’ invokes Medjed – the Wadjet eye of serpent-wisdom, a manifestation of Isis or Sophia. ‘Your true rights’ alludes to the Masonic plumb and square, the rightness of structure in accord with Ma’at, the perfect angle of balance - like the right angled mitre joint. Even ‘a poet’s rage’ conceals a cipher: an anagram of Pythagoras in the mythic sense, the Great Architect Ptah – Peta-goras. (See Appendix I for the PT hydronyms, including Peter, the later ecclesiastical invention of the ‘rock,’ and Appendix VI – Moses as Osiris – for the identity of Shakespeare.)
All of which refer to a document written on papers ‘yellowed with age’; a perfect description of an ancient papyrus document.
These patterns do not stand alone. The same structure of concealment and restoration appears in Book of the Dead Chapter 17, the Djedi narrative, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17 - three expressions of one Atumist-Osirian grammar. In Chapter 17 the speaker proclaims, ‘I am Atum when he was alone,’ declaring self-generation from the waters of Nun. The god breathes, names himself, and re-members his own body. Every repetition of the chapter’s formula re-creates that act: knowledge and utterance (Hu and Sia) restore life through measure. The accompanying plume of Ma’at and the atef-mitre of Osiris show that balance and speech are one process - the breath of truth given form.
The Westcar magician Djedi enacts this principle in miniature. His demonstrations of beheading and restoration are not parlour tricks but dramatizations of the same myth. The goose and bull are Osiris’s dismembered body made whole by the word of power. Djedi’s refusal to repeat the act upon a man preserves the sanctity of divine resurrection: it belongs to the god within the pyramid, not to the stage of men. His name, Djed-i - ‘I am the Djed’ - announces his role as the living pillar through which utterance becomes renewal.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17 is a Renaissance restatement of this identical grammar in poetic form. Its ‘tomb which hides your life and shows not half your parts’ echoes the sarcophagus of Osiris: the visible half stone, the unseen half breath. The ‘beauty of your eyes’ recalls the Wadjet-Medjed current of sight and emission in the Chapter 17 Book of the Dead , while ‘your true rights’ invokes the plumb and square of Ma’at. Each line equates proportion with truth. The sonnet therefore functions as an English Book of the Dead, using measured verse in place of ritual formula to reveal the hidden life within number.
Across all three sources - the funerary text, the magician’s tale, and the Elizabethan poem - the same elements recur: the voice that restores, the severed head re-joined, the plume or mitre of measure, the coffer or tomb that conceals life, and the knowledge that transforms concealment into illumination. Whether carved in hieroglyph, spoken in the court of Khufu, or written in iambic line, the theme is identical: light concealed within form, released through the right word, and re-united with its source. This is the enduring Atumist logic - creation as utterance, resurrection as alignment, the eternal breath of Hu moving through every language of the ages.
It is the Atumist Memphite mythos that recurs throughout the Star Wars Saga.
The Right Hand of Atum
It is Anakin, not Luke, who first loses his right hand. His right arm is severed at the elbow in Attack of the Clones during his duel with Dooku. The wound carries immense archetypal weight. In Egyptian theology, the right hand of Atum was the instrument of creation, the feminine and receptive half through which the god brought forth life. Atum was self-generated, containing both genders within himself, and creation issued from the union of his being with his own hand. Later priestly redactions demonised that act, turning the creative right hand into a symbol of transgression, thereby suppressing the feminine side of the divine.
An echo of this survives in the ancient Arabian legend of Hubal, said to have had his right hand broken off and replaced with a golden one. The image preserves the same mystery in altered form: the wounded creative limb of Atum restored in consecrated metal - the solar element of perfection and incorruptibility. In Attack of the Clones, Anakin receives an identical restoration: a mechanical golden hand, gleaming like Hubal’s, replacing the lost creative appendage. The film thus replays the ancient myth precisely: the demiurge wounded through pride, losing his generative balance, yet granted a radiant prosthesis that marks both his power and his separation from nature. His golden hand is the sign of his fall into mechanised divinity - the father encased in metal, the Atumic light trapped in dark form.
Luke’s later loss of his own hand in The Empire Strikes Back continues the pattern in narrative rather than ritual form. The prosthesis he receives is made to appear natural, because within the story he must go on living as a man, not as a machine. Yet even that realism serves the symbolism: the lifelike hand completes what the golden one began. Where the father’s metal hand signified separation from the organic and the fall into mechanised divinity, the son’s restored flesh-like hand shows the return of balance - the divine reconciled with the human. The pattern holds without needing conscious design by the filmmakers; the archetype works through the logic of the story itself.
The circle closes with the name Yoda itself. In Hebrew the letter Yod signifies the hand - the creative point from which all letters, and therefore all words, begin. It is the spark of manifestation, the smallest mark yet the seed of the entire alphabet. By naming the living master Yoda, the saga unconsciously invokes this archetype of the restored hand. Yoda is the hand made whole - the fullness of Atum regained after the severance of the creative limb. As the teacher who unites wisdom and power, he embodies the reconciliation of word and deed, of god and goddess, of voice and motion. The ‘hand’ and the ‘breath’ become one operation again: the living Word through which the Force - Hu - is spoken and directed.
Thus Yoda in Star Wars is a direct parallel to the wise initiate Djedi. The resemblance is far more than coincidence: both are elder masters who guard the living knowledge of the field when the old order has fallen into corruption. Each speaks in riddles and inversions, the syntax of initiation that conceals truth from the unready while revealing it to the attuned. Djedi is the archetype of the living Djed - the voice of measure and resurrection - and Yoda fulfils the same function as the last surviving Jedi master, keeper of the balance of the Force. Through him the ancient current reappears in modern myth: the sage who preserves the Word, the breath, and the measure until the age is ready to raise the pillar once more.
The Shafts as Gateways of the Breath
The two narrow channels that leave the King’s Chamber have long puzzled archaeologists. Cut with the same precision as the outer masonry yet too small for human use, they begin at the level of the sarcophagus and rise through the mass of the pyramid at carefully calculated inclinations. Their purpose cannot be practical ventilation: they were sealed at both ends and would have required extraordinary labour to create if mere airflow were intended. Their geometry and orientation show that they are symbolic and astronomical in design – gateways for the king’s spirit, or breath, to ascend to the heavens.
Each chamber of the Great Pyramid possesses such channels, but only those of the King’s Chamber pierce the outer casing and open to the sky. The lower Queen’s Chamber shafts stop short within the masonry, suggesting an unfinished or ritual function. The King’s Chamber pair, however, are precise instruments of alignment. When measured in 19th- and 20th-century surveys – Petrie, Edgar Brothers, Badawy, and later Rudolf Gantenbrink’s robotic exploration in the 1990s – the data proved exact.
The southern shaft departs the chamber’s southern wall at roughly 45° and emerges on the pyramid’s 50th course. In the epoch of 2550 BCE this line of sight intersected Alnitak (ζ Orionis), the easternmost star of Orion’s Belt, when it culminated on the meridian. Alnitak was the star that ancient texts identify with Sah, the celestial Osiris. To the Egyptians this was the point of rebirth: the star through which the soul of the justified king ascended to join the body of the god. The southern shaft therefore formed the literal breath-path of Osiris – the conduit by which the king’s spirit, warmed by the life-heat of the ritual chamber, rose as living breath toward the constellation of resurrection. The hidden essence of Isis, the queen of heaven.
The northern shaft leaves the wall at about 32° 36′ and aimed, in the same period, directly toward Thuban (α Draconis), then the Pole Star. Thuban marked the pivot of the heavens, the imperishable axis around which the constellations turned. Egyptian texts called these northern stars the Ikhemu-Sek, the ‘Unwearying Ones,’ eternal lights that never set. The king was said to ‘join the circumpolar stars and never die.’ The northern shaft thus symbolised the fixed Djed – the eternal stability of the soul.
Together the two channels define a perfect duality: motion and rest, resurrection and eternity, breath and axis. The king, lying within the coffer – the flint box of Thoth – becomes the Osirian body. His final breath rises through the southern passage as the Hu of Atum, a form of Isis, the living voice ascending toward her mate in Orion. The northern passage anchors that ascent in permanence, linking the same soul to the unchanging stars of the circumpolar sky. The structure therefore reproduces in stone the entire Osirian mystery of death and rebirth, uniting heaven’s dynamic and static poles.
Thermodynamic studies support this interpretation. Even with modern measuring devices, a faint convection current persists within the shafts; warm air from the chamber rises through the southern conduit, cooler air descends from the north. The pyramid literally breathes. The architects appear to have designed the monument to embody the same motion that its symbolism proclaimed – the alternation of inhalation and exhalation between earth and sky. The upward flow of heated air is the physical manifestation of the breath of Hu; the downward draw through the northern duct is the returning whisper of Ma’at, restoring balance. The life drawn from the sun’s heat of the day by the cold of the night. Horus journey’s through the cycle and returns to his Father and Mother by convection.
The Polar Gate of the North
If the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber directed the breath of Hu towards the belt of Orion and thus to Osiris, its northern counterpart carried an equal weight of symbolism. It opened not toward the sun’s path but to the eternal axis of heaven, the point about which all stars revolved. Through this narrow duct the king’s spirit was to ascend into the region of the ‘Unwearying Ones’ - the imperishable stars that never set.
When Khufu’s pyramid was raised, the star that occupied that position was Thuban (α Draconis) in the constellation Draco. Around 2550 BCE Thuban lay within a third of a degree of the true celestial pole, making it the still eye of the northern sky. To the Egyptian astronomer-priests this was the immovable pivot, the celestial Djed, the visible emblem of Ma’at’s stability. The northern shaft of the King’s Chamber, inclined at about 32° 36′, was calculated with remarkable accuracy to aim directly at Thuban when it culminated on the meridian. In that epoch the star would have appeared each night at the same point above the horizon, circling minutely but never setting - a perfect image of eternal life.
The texts of the Pyramid Age confirm this doctrine. In the Pyramid Texts of Unas, the king ascends ‘to the sky among the stars that know not destruction.’ These were the Ikhemu-Sek, the Unwearying or Imperishable Ones, the same circumpolar lights to which the shaft was directed. Through that narrow channel the breath of the pharaoh was believed to join the unchanging northern realm, ensuring that his soul would never die.
But as the centuries passed, the heavens themselves drifted. Because of Earth’s slow axial precession - a motion completing one cycle in about 25,800 years - the celestial pole traces a vast circle through the stars. Between Khufu’s time and the composition of the Book of the Dead more than a thousand years later, the pole had moved several degrees away from Thuban and toward the group of stars we now call Ursa Major and Ursa Minor - the Plough or Great Bear. By the early New Kingdom (c. 1500 BCE) Thuban no longer held its station; the stars of the Plough had become the practical guide to north, circling closest to the true pole.
This astronomical shift is clearly reflected in later Egyptian texts. In Book of the Dead Chapter 17 and related passages, the celestial pole is described not as the serpent of Draco but as the Bull’s Thigh - the constellation known to us as the Plough or Ursa Major. The myth recounts that the thigh of the celestial bull (Set) was torn from his body and fixed in the northern sky by Isis, forming the new imperishable constellation. The goddess thus re-established order in the heavens after the slaying of Osiris. What for the Old Kingdom was Thuban’s fixed star became, by the New Kingdom, the Plough - the visible emblem of the same immutable axis. The mythology adapted to the changing sky without losing its meaning.
The continuity is unmistakable. Both Thuban and the Bull’s Thigh mark the pole of the world, the still point around which the cosmos revolves. The Egyptian priesthood simply translated the axis from one constellation to another as precession demanded. The theological content remained constant: the northern gate as the realm of eternity, the southern gate as the path of resurrection. The pyramid’s alignment is therefore the architectural expression of a truth that the later texts verbalised - the dual nature of ascent. Through the southern shaft the breath of Hu rose as living utterance toward Orion, uniting with Osiris; through the northern shaft the same breath entered the realm of the undying stars, achieving permanence. Motion and stillness, form and field, the twin currents of Isis and Osiris, were perfectly balanced.
The precision of the pyramid builders’ design is confirmed by modern astronomy. Computer reconstructions of the sky at 2550 BCE show that the northern shaft aimed at Thuban within less than one degree of error; the southern shaft, at the same date, at Alnitak in Orion’s Belt. No later monument reproduces this level of stellar exactitude. The Great Pyramid thus encodes the heavens of its epoch - the Osirian sky of Thuban - while the Book of the Dead preserves the theology of its successors - the Isian sky of the Plough. Between them lies the sweep of precession, yet the axis remains unbroken.
Symbolically, this shifting of the polar guide mirrors the very process of death and rebirth that the pyramid itself enacts. The pole moves, yet the centre endures. Thuban yields to the Plough as Osiris yields to Horus: the new star carries forward the same light. In this way the architecture, the myth, and the motion of the heavens all speak the same language - the breath of the world moving through the body of time. The northern shaft is the gateway of spirit, the mouth of the pyramid through which the eternal air returns to the stars.
A note on the dismissals of the alignment theories: some writers ascribe the pyramid’s stellar geometry to a much earlier date, while others reject all such theories for lack of exactitude. To both positions it must be said that we are not dealing with modern surveying, but with symbolic alignment - a correspondence of meaning rather than mechanical precision. Within the tolerances achievable by Fourth Dynasty techniques, the data remain consistent and compelling. The pyramid’s design was intended to mirror the heavens, not to satisfy the standards of modern engineering. The fact that its orientations still register within a degree of their intended targets after forty-five centuries is evidence enough of deliberate purpose. To dismiss the alignments because they do not fit either conventional chronology or speculative catastrophism is to overlook the symbolic accuracy that the Egyptians themselves prized most: harmony between sky and stone, between the motion of the stars and the breath of the world.
The Foreleg of the Bull and the Vengeance Cycle
In the northern sky the Bull’s Thigh - the foreleg of the celestial bull - became, by the New Kingdom, the chief emblem of the pole. The Egyptians called it Mesketiu the ‘ham’ or foreleg; in one Egyptian myth Thoth cut off one of Set’s legs and hurled it there. (In Mesopotamian myth it was hurled there by Enki.) The constellation we now call the Plough, Big Dipper or Ursa Major. The myth describes the punishment of the slayer: Set, the murderer of Osiris, immobilised and pinned to the polar axis so that he could do no further harm. Each night the unchanging stars marked his eternal binding.
This same motif of dismemberment, vengeance, and restoration runs like a hidden thread through Western drama. Shakespeare inherits it consciously in Hamlet. The prince’s very name conceals the Ham, the foreleg of the bull, and his story recapitulates the Osirian cycle in human form. The murdered father is Osiris; the usurping uncle, Claudius, is Set - uncle of Horus; the grieving and divided mother, Gertrude, the Isis–Nephthys figure who embodies both loyalty and error. Hamlet’s vengeance is not personal but archetypal: the restoration of cosmic order through exposure of the hidden crime. ‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ is the formula of initiation - the use of enacted truth to compel confession and rebalance the field. The duel and mutual death that end the tragedy are the Western echo of the same myth that the Book of the Dead resolved in the judgement hall: wrong must consume itself so that Ma’at may stand.
The pattern repeats once more in the modern mythos of Star Wars. Darth Vader - his very title an echo of Djedi and of father - enacts the Setian role. As Anakin he is the luminous son, the Horus yet to fall; as Vader he becomes the dark twin who destroys the maternal principle. His ‘slaughter of the innocents’ in the temple mirrors the Exodus tale of Moses, the Herodian massacre of the biblical redaction and the Setian outrage against Isis and the child Horus. The archetype recurs with perfect fidelity: the old order turned to violence against the seed of renewal, the mother or guardian spiriting the infant to safety. Luke, like Moses, is concealed on the desert’s edge, raised by foster parents until his destined time. Both grow to manhood unaware of their true lineage, called at last by a voice from the unseen world - be it the burning bush or the spectral Obi-Wan - to deliver their people from bondage. The cycle is clear: the mother dies or is defiled, the son descends into shadow, and through the compassion of his own offspring the axis is restored. Luke, the Sky-Walker, completes the work of Horus by redeeming the father; the hidden light returns to balance.
Thus the Ham of the northern sky, the Hamlet of Renaissance theatre, and the Jedi–Skywalker/Vader of modern cinema are different tellings of one continuum - the vengeance of light against the destroyer of form, the restoration of the goddess’s place within the field. From the Bull’s Thigh to Elsinore to the Death Star, the same symbolic geometry persists: the severed limb fixed in heaven, the guilty brother unmasked, the son who reconciles heaven and earth. All are chapters of the same Osirian–Atumist scripture, retold in the languages of their age.
No other explanation fits so completely both the geometry and the theology. The pyramid is a mechanical hieroglyph of respiration and resurrection. Its form is the Djed; its interior motion, Medjed. The King’s Chamber is the heart of this living structure, half stone and half air, half body and half breath. Within it Isis, the fluid spirit, meets Osiris, the perfected form. The southern shaft is her out-breath, the ascent of life towards the stars of Orion; the northern shaft is his in-breath, the eternal return of order from the circumpolar realm. The king, typically sealed within the sarcophagus, thus becomes the point of equilibrium between the two – the living axis through which the universe renews itself.
Later cultures preserved faint memories of this celestial engineering. Biblical references to Jacob’s ladder reaching unto heaven and to the trumpet of God that shall raise the dead echo the same concept of a vertical conduit between worlds. In the Pyramid Texts of Pepi II, Atum is described as ‘binding a rope ladder for the king,’ by which the soul ascends to unite with the Creator. The ascent takes place between the two lions of the horizon - the twin guardians of sunrise and sunset that mark the eternal doorway of rebirth. The pyramid’s shaft was the physical expression of that ladder, the ‘voice’ of the monument - a column of invisible energy linking the earthly chamber to the stars, precisely as the Westcar story described: the hidden chamber of Thoth whose measure opens only to the initiated.
From a purely scientific standpoint, the alignments are exact enough that coincidence can be ruled out. Precession of the equinoxes has since altered the sky, but computer reconstructions of 2500 BCE confirm the shaft to Alnitak and to Thuban within less than a degree of accuracy. The builders therefore designed the Great Pyramid as a stellar instrument – a monument that breathes and speaks, expressing in architecture what the priests expressed in liturgy: the ascent of the spirit through the measured harmony of light and air.
Textual and material echoes reinforce this reading. Khufu’s Horus name Medjedu, as documented in the chapter material, situates the king himself as a functionary of the hidden axis – an embodied Djed who renders measure visible in the built horizon. The later Medjed of the Book of the Dead, far from being a curiosity, is the cultural memory of that operative: a veiled form with radiant eyes and toroidal presence, described in funerary texts as an agent of renewal and continuity. Conventional readings have miscast Medjed through a single gloss; this reconstruction restores him to his true axial, vesical, and wick-like nature.
Architecturally, the ‘secret chambers’ motif maps to a broader Egyptian practice: inner sancta that are timed and opened by right sequence. The Pyramid Texts and Unas’s funerary inscriptions show an identical concern with interior speech and sealed measures - the king reciting the words of ascent, the text functioning as procedure rather than poem. The Westcar story therefore preserves a second-order memory of that procedure: that which is sung or said at the right node effects a change in relation to the field. In practical terms, the tale teaches restraint - the keeper of the measure reveals its locus, but nominates the proper heirs rather than simply transferring control to royal desire.
Viewed in the light of my IXOS architecture, Medjed functions as the enclosed attractor - the toroidal return within which line, circle and spiral find coherent recursion. The flint box at Heliopolis is therefore symbolic shorthand for a resonant manifold: a contained geometry that will only answer to an initiated sequence of operations. The Westcar narration thus encodes a proto-physics of custodial alignment - the idea that measure and field interact only when proper operator, place and lineage coincide. This is the technical moral of the story: mastery without initiation becomes spectacle; initiation without right measure becomes dogma. The tale preserves both warnings.
The Medjed–Djedi Axis: The Measure of Giza and Heliopolis
Reassessing the Name and its Context
Egyptology has long followed Faulkner’s tentative gloss of Medjed as “the smiter.” The artificially broken term mdj (from me-djed) however also means to set firm or to establish. When read through architectural language it refers to fixing a pillar, not striking.
In the titulary Khufu Medjedu, the suffix –u denotes embodiment: “he in whom the axis stands.” The name therefore describes Khufu as the established one – the living Djed, the human embodiment of Ma’at and the operator of measure.
Djedi, Medjedu and the Migration of the Axis
In the Westcar Papyrus the magician Djedi knows “the number of the chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth.” This is a cipher for geometric measure – the hidden ratio that defines both temple and cosmos. Djedi, the knower of measure, mirrors Medjedu, the establisher of measure.
When the royal cult moved from Saqqara to Giza, and later to Iunu (Heliopolis), the same axis moved with it. Medjed – the pillar of measure – literally “walked.” Heliopolis was not a new creation but a rotation of the original geometry: Giza reborn in solar alignment. The tale instructs initiates – to understand Iunu, study the perfected axis at Giza.
The Geometry of Transmission
Carl Balowski’s 2024 metrological study confirms that the line from the Great Pyramid to Heliopolis lies at 45 degrees to the pyramid’s base. The right angle unites the square of Earth with the circle of the Sun – a physical expression of the Djed in motion.
He identifies an “Osirian Cubit” equal to one-seventy-second of the Giza-Heliopolis square, encoding the solar year’s 72 divisions and the Osiris cycle. The same 72-based system appears in the 5:6 relation between the megalithic yard and the metre, linking Neolithic, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian measure in one field geometry.
Empirical Summary
• Giza base to Heliopolis alignment – 45° (1:√2) – Earth–Sun right angle, migration of the axis
• “Osirian Cubit” to Giza base – 1:72 – solar year division, Osiris cycle
• Megalithic yard to metre – 5:6 – Drift-culture scaling constant
• Royal Cubit – 0.523 m ≈ π/6 – circle ratio embedded in linear unit
Together these ratios form a coherent harmonic system linking terrestrial and celestial geometry. They are measurable facts, not speculation.
From Balowski (2024) and related surveys:
Satellite mapping shows the Giza–Heliopolis axis (45°) continuing beyond Cairo, intersecting the modern suburb of Matariya, identified with ancient Iunu.
The measured distance between the Great Pyramid and the Heliopolis temple mound is approximately 23 km, forming a 1:100 ratio to the pyramid’s base, another scaling harmonic.
The temple of Re-Atum at Heliopolis faces 90° to the Giza alignment, preserving the same orthogonal schema.
The Osirian Cubit (3.2053 m) appears as a modular unit in later Nilotic surveying inscriptions, linking it to the Royal Cubit (0.523 m) by a clean factor of six.
Together these observations reinforce that Heliopolis was geometrically and ritually derived from Giza, not invented anew.
(Images from The Great Pyramid of Heliopolis - AN OSIRIAN CALENDRIC UNIT FROM KHUFU’S PYRAMID USED FOR LARGE SCALE - METROLOGY (LSM) Carl Balowski | April 2024)
Interpretation
Medjed names the state of established balance. Djedi is the fictional practitioner of that balance, and the priestly scribe who transmits this knowledge through his fable. Medjedu is the embodiment of that balance in the king. Khufu Medjedu therefore stands as the archetypal Axis-King, operator of Ma’at and measure. When the cult centre moved eastward the axis was not abandoned but transplanted – Iunu became Giza rotated toward the rising sun. The myth records the geometry.
Significance
Recognising Medjed as the principle of established measure restores a lost cornerstone of Egyptian science. It integrates language, myth and metrology within one system of proportion. The new data confirms that Egypt’s sacred architecture was an extension of Neolithic field geometry – a Drift-Culture inheritance spanning thousands of miles and centuries (see Chapter 6 for further evidence of the shared measure and geometry across continents). Medjed, long mistaken for a minor “smiter,” emerges as the keystone of Ma’at itself – stability through proportion, the living Djed of the world axis.
From the Axis to the Perfection of Measure
The geometry embodied in the Medjed–Djedi axis opens directly into the broader Egyptian fascination with how form rises from foundation. Their myth and architecture revolve around the act of raising the triangle from the base, the visible birth of height and spirit from the square of matter. The same act reconciles the triangle, square, and circle – the three primal forms through which every ratio of nature is expressed.
This was no poetic conceit. The Egyptians were working within the same harmonic constants that science now quantifies. The ratios governing the pyramid’s slope, the sun’s apparent motion, and the cycle of precession are the same ratios that describe light’s behaviour and temporal dilation in modern physics. What the Egyptians called Ma’at – truth through balance – is the same structural equilibrium that sustains the physical universe.
The ten-point circle and tetractys ratios derived in the IXOS framework demonstrate mathematically what the ancient builders perceived intuitively: that the universe is recursive, harmonic, and self-similar at every scale. The square is matter, the circle is motion, and the triangle is the mediating field that allows one to become the other. When Khufu raised the Great Pyramid, he inscribed that law in stone – the harmonic that modern science has only recently rediscovered as relativity’s geometric constant.
The Egyptian system, in its purity, was therefore a scientific philosophy as well as a sacred art. It united observation and revelation in a single act of measure, foreseeing within its own geometry the harmonic relationships that physics now recognises as universal law. (See Appendix XII - The Perfection of Measure - for a thorough examination of this data).
The King’s Chamber: The Geometry of the Axis
Following the Medjed–Djedi alignment between Giza and Heliopolis, the geometry of measure finds its purest expression inside the Great Pyramid itself. The King’s Chamber is not simply an interior room – it is a fixed model of the harmonic field. Carl Balowski’s metrological study (2024) demonstrates that this chamber embodies the same constants of ratio found throughout the Egyptian canon and across the earlier Drift-Culture field geometry.
The Chamber as a Harmonic Field
The plan of the King’s Chamber is a perfect 2:1 rectangle – a doubled square. The short wall measures ten royal cubits, the long wall twenty. Using the verified royal cubit of 0.523606 m, the chamber’s width is 5.236 m, its length 10.472 m.
The diagonal across the floor is √5 times the short side:
5.236 × √5 = 11.708 m.
The ideal height, formed by halving the diagonal, is √5 ÷ 2 × 10 = 11.18 cubits – a value confirmed within Petrie’s recorded range. Thus, the chamber completes the sequence of the two simplest harmonic fields:
Square to diagonal = √2 → the royal cubit relation.
Rectangle (2:1) to diagonal = √5 → the golden field relation.
The pyramid’s internal geometry therefore mirrors the same harmonic logic as the Giza–Heliopolis axis: a rotation from the square (Earth) to the diagonal (Heaven).
The Right Triangle of Measure
In his paper The Geometrical Trifecta: The √5 Right Triangle, the King’s Chamber, and the Potential Metric Legacy of the Royal Cubit, Balowski identifies a special case of the 1:2:√5 triangle that locks perfectly to the King’s Chamber dimensions. If the short side is taken as 3 + √5, then:
short = 5.236 m
long = 10.472 m
diagonal = 11.708 m
This single triangle produces an extraordinary equality:
area = perimeter = (3 + √5)² = 27.4164
In other words, the triangle balances its own measure – its surface and boundary are numerically identical. This is the literal manifestation of Ma’at: area and perimeter in perfect harmony.
Verification of the Unit
The cubit value used for these calculations is not speculative. It is the midpoint of Petrie’s and Dash’s independent surveys of Giza:
Petrie (1883): mean implied cubit = 0.523701 m.
Dash (2015): mean implied cubit = 0.523563 m.
Balowski’s working value of 0.523606 m lies directly between them. The same figure is confirmed by physical artefacts:
Rod of Maya = 0.523 m (−0.12%).
Rod of Kha = 0.524 m (+0.08%).
Across three millennia the royal cubit remains within a single millimetre of its Old Kingdom value – proof that it was not an arbitrary unit, but a product of geometric law.
The Chamber as a Living Equation
When drawn as a plan, the King’s Chamber expresses the simplest progression of form:
A square (1:1) becomes its diagonal (√2).
The square doubled into a rectangle (2:1) becomes its diagonal (√5).
Half the diagonal (√5 ÷ 2) gives the height, creating a perfect spatial harmonic.
In symbolic language: Earth (square) → Heaven (circle) → Axis (triangle).
Every major element of the pyramid follows the same law: the base defines the square, the height embodies the diagonal, and the apex joins the two through the triangle of transformation. The King’s Chamber is the geometric heart of that transformation.
The Djedi Principle Made Stone
In the Westcar Papyrus, Djedi “knows the number of the chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth.” The King’s Chamber is that sanctuary made manifest – the chamber of measure. Its proportions contain the number that unites all right-angled forms.
The name Djedi thus encodes knowledge of the 2:1 field – the passage from the square of matter to the triangle of ascent. It is the living Djed, the fixed axis around which light, sound, and time unfold.
When viewed through this lens, Khufu’s pyramid is not a tomb but an instrument of proportion, an architectural theorem that translates the hidden ratios of nature into visible form.
Summary of Empirical Data
• Chamber plan – 10 × 20 royal cubits (5.236 × 10.472 m).
• Floor diagonal – √5 × 10 cubits = 11.708 m.
• Ideal height – √5 ÷ 2 × 10 cubits = 11.18 cubits.
• Working cubit – 0.523606 m (midpoint of Petrie and Dash).
• Triangle identity – 1:2:√5 → area = perimeter = (3 + √5)².
• Rods of Maya and Kha confirm cubit stability within 0.1%.
Meaning within the Axis
The King’s Chamber confirms that the geometry of Giza was not decorative, but structural – a direct embodiment of the same measure that connected Medjed (the fixed axis) with Djedi (the knowing of measure). The chamber is Ma’at realised in stone: a right-angled world reconciled through proportion.
It stands as the silent proof that the Egyptian canon was grounded in measurable, harmonic constants. These same ratios run through the Drift-Culture monuments, the Near Eastern rods of measure, and the golden fields of later temples.
Through Khufu Medjedu, the Djed became flesh; through the King’s Chamber, the Djed became form.
By accident or by design?
It seems beyond doubt that the Orion alignment was deliberate, confirming the Storm God thesis that the monument was designed as a living reflection of the sky whose primary focus was Orion at night. Yet it is less certain that the pyramid builders consciously employed all the Pythagorean and phi-based mathematics that later generations discerned in its form. The pyramid’s many complex harmonic proportions may have arisen organically, the natural outcome of empirical technique guided by observation of the heavens and the Nile’s geometry. Simple tools - plumb line, cord, and sighting staff - applied with precision and intuition could have produced the relationships we now call sacred geometry.
By the time of the Westcar tale, however, much more may have been observed and understood. The priests and sages who preserved the Pyramid tradition could see that the structure embodied mathematical perfection, even if its earliest designers had intuited rather than calculated it. In that recognition the pyramid gained a second life as a text of number - a monument that seemed to encode the laws of creation itself. Legends backed by geometry became irrefutable; myth gained the authority of measure. From this perception grew the later cults of initiation centred on Giza, and eventually the Sphinx cult, in which the pyramid and its guardian were no longer seen as tomb and statue but as the axis of cosmic knowledge, a geometry made divine.
Finally, politically the Westcar episode marks a real transition. The tale is set in Khufu’s court yet the revelation belongs to heirs of a priestess at Heliopolis - an allegory of the transfer of cosmic custody from monumental kingship to the solar priesthood that will shape the Fifth Dynasty. In other words, Westcar is not merely a parable about magic; it is a memorialisation of a structural shift in custodianship of the axis. That shift is precisely the pattern Chapter 10 traces: the living science of Ma’at becoming a managed theology of institutional priests. The Djedi tale remembers the moment when knowledge moved from embodied king to initiated cleric - and when the hidden axis continued, disguised as ritual.
The axiom is worth repeating here:
Myth + Math = Ma’at
The Sphinx and the Father of Terror
At Giza the cycle finds its first and last image in the Sphinx, the silent guardian of the horizon. In Egyptian it was known as nḥ3-ḥr - literally ‘the Face of Terror.’ The phrase denoted not cruelty but awe: the visage of overwhelming power that confronts the soul at the threshold of the divine. To meet that gaze was to face the unknown, the very force that could unmake or renew creation. In later Arabic the same being was called Abū al-Hawl, ‘the Father of Terror,’ a title preserving both the fear and reverence the monument inspired.
The Greeks translated the name simply as Sphinx - ‘the strangler’ - emphasising its aspect as the trial that tests those who seek knowledge. Across all tongues the meaning endures: the terrifying beauty of the divine face, the stillness before revelation. Vader’s first terrible act as Jedi/Sith (a clear reference to Seth) black magician is to strangle his naysayer who mocks the ways of the Force. In the Death Star’s conference chamber, Admiral Motti derides Vader’s reliance on the Force to recover the stolen plans, boasting instead of the station’s mechanical power. Motti’s arrogance about the Death Star’s invincibility and his contempt for Vader’s ‘sorcerer’s ways’ provoke the unseen response of the ancient archetype: the Force choke, as Vader declares with icy precision, ‘I find your lack of faith disturbing.’ It is the Sphinx’s ordeal reborn - the strangler confronting hubris, compelling silence before the mystery of unseen power.
In form and in essence the Sphinx anticipates the modern image of Darth Vader, whose name itself means ‘Father.’ He is the Father of Terror, the living Abū al-Hawl of our era. The sculpted nemes headdress becomes the black helmet; the serpent crest becomes the angular ridge of the visor; the serene royal countenance becomes the mask of dread. The angular mask is the pharaoh’s disfigured face. When Anakin is burned and sealed within the armour, his transfiguration mirrors the priestly mutilation of the Sphinx - turning the living nḥ3-ḥr, the Face of Light, into a petrified emblem of fear. Both figures are monuments to the captured breath. Vader’s mechanical respiration - the slow, rhythmic exhalation that defines him - is the distorted echo of Hu, the creative utterance reduced to machine sound. His voice fills the darkened temple of the cinema as the Sphinx’s silent breath once filled the dawn horizon.
The Beheaded and the Hidden Box
In the Westcar Papyrus, Djedi demonstrates his mastery by beheading and restoring a goose and a bull. To Egyptologists this has long seemed a display of priestly magic, yet its logic is deeper. It is a hieroglyphic allegory, a coded reference to the place of the hidden measure. The tale is nominally set at Iunu (Heliopolis), but its imagery points unmistakably to Giza - the true site of the ‘Head of Terror,’ the Great Sphinx. The act of beheading and reunion signals a topographical and symbolic key: the ‘flint box’ of Thoth lies not in the solar temple of Heliopolis but beneath the gaze of the Sphinx, where the living head of the god meets the chamber of sacred number.
The Sphinx itself is a colossal decapitated head - a human face rising from the body of a lion. Carved from a single ridge of limestone, the head is geologically distinct from the body, its scale reduced and re-cut in antiquity. Ancient accounts described it as the ‘Face of Terror,’ nḥ3-ḥr, a severed or ‘cut’ face, the guardian at the threshold of knowledge. In later Arabic this became Abū al-Hawl, the Father of Terror, preserving both awe and dread. The monument is therefore the petrified emblem of the very ritual enacted by Djedi: the separation of head and body, intellect and form, and their re-union through the word of power.
The goose restored by Djedi is another cipher for the site itself. The bird was sacred to Geb and Amun and to the Benben - the mound of first creation. Its Egyptian name, ges or g’s, is phonetically close to Giza. The ‘restored goose’ is thus the restored Giza, the reborn mound of creation. When the magician re-attaches the head of the bird, he is re-membering the benben - the original mound whose apex became the pyramid and whose guardian was the Sphinx. The story tells us, in mythic shorthand, that the box of measure is concealed at the place of the goose, the place of the head - Geesa, the Giza plateau.
This association continues seamlessly into the visual language of modern myth. Darth Vader’s head and helmet - always emphasised in silhouette and ritual framing - are the mechanical counterpart of the same archetype. The Sphinx’s mutilated face, the ‘Head of Terror,’ finds its echo in Vader’s black mask and resonant breathing. Both are fallen suns encased in darkness, guardians of a mystery whose resolution comes only through revelation of the hidden face. When the mask is removed, the terror dissolves and breath returns to its natural rhythm. The decapitated head is re-joined to the body, the Djed raised, the field restored.
Thus, the beheading motif of the Westcar tale is more than allegory; it is a cartographic and symbolic code. It identifies Giza as the locus of the ‘flint box,’ uniting the Sphinx, the benben goose, and the head-restoration rite in one continuous act of initiation. The ‘Face of Terror’ at Giza and the ‘head restored by word of power’ in the papyrus are one and the same event - the awakening of the conscious axis through the breath of the field. The site, the myth, and the modern vision all converge upon the same revelation: the head of stone speaks again when breath and measure are reunited.
The same Djedi code surfaces again in Sonnet 17, where the poet laments that his ‘verse in time to come’ will not be believed, ‘though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb which hides your life and shows not half your parts.’ The ‘most high deserts’ are not merely virtues or rewards but the literal deserts that for centuries buried the Sphinx to its neck. The monument was indeed ‘a tomb which hides life,’ its body entombed in sand while only the head - the Face of Terror - remained visible. The sonnet thus describes the Sphinx’s condition: a living form turned sepulchre, its hidden geometry and sacred measure concealed beneath the ‘high deserts’ of time. The line ‘shows not half your parts’ speaks with uncanny precision of the monument’s half-buried state. The poem therefore preserves, in Elizabethan cipher, the same knowledge held in the Westcar tale - the riddle of the severed head and the hidden body, the tomb that hides life, and the promise that one day the buried truth will be uncovered and the full form revealed once more.
The parallel is exact. The Sphinx stands before the pyramid as guardian of initiation; Vader stands at the threshold of the saga as guardian of the shadow. The ‘Father of Terror’ is the same archetype refracted through time: the disfigured light awaiting redemption, the silence before the return of the word. When the mask is finally removed and the human face revealed, the breath becomes natural again, and the old terror dissolves into recognition. In that instant the nḥ3-ḥr of Giza breathes once more - the petrified god restored through understanding.
Thus, the Face of Terror, whether carved in limestone or cast in metal, remains one figure: the fallen sun behind the veil. Its redemption through light and breath is the Return of the Djedi itself - the awakening of the living field from the sleep of stone, the Father of Terror transformed back into the Father of Light.
Part 2 – From Horizon to Screen: Rebirth of the Sky-Walker
The Westcar Papyrus marks the first fully preserved moment in human literature where sacred narrative turns consciously mythic, using story to transmit an inherited science of nature. When Khufu seeks the secret number of Thoth’s chambers, he is not chasing superstition but the geometry of creation itself – the correspondence between heaven and form. That same quest, written in a different language, still plays across our cinema screens. The modern audience that watches a spacecraft rise toward twin suns is being invited into the same horizon that Khufu built in stone.
The horizon was always more than a line. In Egyptian it was Akhet – the junction of sky and earth, a glyph formed by a sun disc rising between two hills. Every temple and pyramid was an architectural expression of that symbol. Each morning, as the sun emerged between the cliffs of the eastern bank, the world renewed its covenant with light. The king stood at that point of emergence, the living mediator between heaven and earth. When Khufu named his pyramid Akhet-Khufu – ‘the Horizon of Khufu’ – he identified himself with the moment of rebirth itself. The monument was both tomb and sunrise, the fixed axis through which the solar field re-entered the world.
It is this archetype that survives intact in the image that opens Star Wars: the small moon of Tatooine, the twin suns, and a young man gazing toward the horizon. Luke Skywalker’s name is itself a translation of Heru-Shemsu-Pet, ‘the sky-walker’ – the Horus-figure who traverses the heavens, bridging the mortal and the divine. His journey is not invention but revival. The desert world, the twin lights, the unseen father, and the call to restore balance all replay the oldest Egyptian mythic cycle – the emergence of Horus from the hidden Osiris to re-establish Ma’at. The audience recognises it instinctively because it is the same psychic structure that has moved through the human imagination since the Pyramid Age.
The desert of Tatooine mirrors the arid plateau of Giza. The domed dwellings recall the ancient mastabas, half buried in sand. The twin suns echo the dual aspects of the solar god – the day-sun Re and the night-sun Atum – whose eternal alternation sustains creation. The mechanical moisture farmers who draw vapour from the air repeat the ritual logic of the Egyptian temple, where water from the Nile was lifted to refresh the god each dawn. Even the robots – tireless servants of order – are modern personifications of the Shabti, the animated helpers placed in tombs to serve the resurrected soul. What seems futuristic is a full circle back to the ancient: the same symbolic grammar expressed through new materials.
Within this frame, the Westcar story functions as the mythic prototype. Khufu’s longing to reach the secret of the chambers is the same yearning that drives Luke to leave his homestead. Both seek the hidden principle of renewal. Djedi, the sage who holds the knowledge but withholds its use, becomes the model for the elder guide – Obi-Wan Kenobi – whose wisdom lies in restraint. In both tales the younger hero must earn revelation through ordeal, not command it by will. The lesson is identical: true power arises from alignment with the field, not from domination over it.
The Akhet – the horizon – is thus the stage upon which the archetype repeats. In Egypt it was the physical junction of sky and land; in the modern myth it becomes the boundary between worlds, the threshold to space. When the spacecraft rises beyond the planet’s curve, it crosses the same symbolic gate that the soul crossed in the Pyramid Texts. In both cases, the act is resurrection – the ascent of the luminous body from the tomb of matter into the living field. What for Khufu was the Great Pyramid’s internal geometry becomes, for the filmmaker, the geometry of light projected through the cinema lens.
This is why the Star Wars saga resonates globally in a way few modern stories do. Beneath its technological surface, it restores the oldest sacred narrative known to humankind: the passage from darkness to light, from ignorance to insight, from imbalance to Ma’at. The cinema has become the new temple of illumination, the screen a modern Akhet through which light is born from shadow. The audience, seated in darkness, experiences the same ritual sequence once enacted in the inner chambers of Egyptian sanctuaries – descent into obscurity, revelation through radiance, and return to the world transformed.
The Westcar tale anticipated this entire cycle. By transferring the secret from the king to the unborn heirs of a priestess, it foretold the periodic renewal of knowledge itself. Each age must recover the measure in its own idiom. The priesthood of Heliopolis inherited it through the Fifth Dynasty; the philosophers of Greece recast it in geometry; the theologians of Rome encased it in creed; and the storytellers of our own time rediscovered it as mythic cinema. The horizon remains the same; only the language of its light changes.
In this sense the Star Wars epic is the natural re-emergence of a pattern long imprinted in human consciousness: the solar ascent, the filial succession, the return of the balance of the Force – which is simply the return of Ma’at. The sage who vanishes into light, the father who falls into shadow, and the son who restores the unity of opposites are Egyptian in every detail. They belong to the same cosmology that once defined kingship, measured pyramids, and shaped the earliest literature. The Westcar Papyrus, the Great Pyramid, and the modern screen are stages of a single continuum – the story of light seeking itself.
Part 3 – Djedi, Djed, and Medjed: Pillar, Sage, and Field
To read the Westcar story properly, one must see that its three principal names - Khufu, Djedi, and the unspoken Medjedu principle implied through Khufu’s Horus name - describe not separate individuals but functions of a single process. The king, the sage, and the hidden field together embody the triune structure through which Egypt expressed every act of creation: form, measure, and life.
The Djed was the oldest of these forms. In temple reliefs it appears as a pillar with four crossbars, a stylised spine representing the stability of Osiris, the god who dismembered himself into matter and was re-raised through love and order. To ‘raise the Djed’ was both ritual and equation: to align the axis of the body, the pillar of the temple, and the spine of the cosmos. Each level mirrored the others. The act was repeated annually in the festival of Khoiak, when the priests hoisted a great wooden Djed before the assembled people - a symbolic reinstatement of coherence after the flooding of the Nile and the disarray of the year’s death.
The Djedi of Westcar is that pillar made sentient. His very name carries the verb djed - to say, to declare, to endure - followed by the personal particle i, ‘I am.’ ‘I am the Djed’ is thus his title and his nature. The feats he performs before Khufu are demonstrations of Osirian power in living form: the restoration of a severed head to its body, the calming of lions, the pronouncement of hidden measure. These are not tricks of magic but statements of mastery over the field - the same powers that the Pyramid Texts ascribe to the resurrected king. Djedi is the living Djed: the master of articulation, whose utterance (Hu) and sight (Sia) align word, breath, and light. When he declines to reveal Thoth’s secret, he acts according to the higher rule of Ma’at - knowledge withheld until harmony allows it to be received.
Beneath both stands the Medjed principle, rarely named but everywhere present. In the Westcar papyrus his figure appears as a rounded, veiled form with two eyes or beams of light issuing outward. He is a raised benben or bread sign. Earlier scholarship misread the accompanying captions as ‘he who strikes from the eye,’ but in this study, following the re-examination we recognise the phrase not as violence but as description: the emission of life-force through vision, the outward radiation of awareness. Medjed is the Djed in motion, the field within the pillar - the toroidal flow that sustains form. His covering cloth marks latency; his eyes are the points of emergence where energy meets perception. He is the invisible medium that gives life to structure, just as the wick gives life to flame.
Khufu’s own Horus name, Medjedu, confirms the link. It denotes ‘the hidden Djed’ or ‘the concealed measure’ - the same concept encoded architecturally in the sealed chambers of his pyramid. The image of Medjed on the greenfield Papyrus specifically depicts him next to the goose and in the air is the falcon - one representing the earthy ensouled and the falcon the other aspect of the duality of the ba bird, as the soul that rises to Heaven after death. Within that geometry the living field was thought to circulate eternally, preserving the king’s Ka within the currents of light. The Egyptians saw the earth reflected in the heavens, which was the basis of the afterlife journey. As above, so below. As in life, so in death.
In this way the three figures - Khufu, Djedi, Medjed - compose a single archetypal sequence: the form that seeks balance, the master who knows balance, and the field that enacts balance. Balance which includes a judgement after death, typified by the weighing of the heart against the feather of Ma’at. All is dualist and cyclic to the Egyptian initiate.
This triad recurs throughout Egyptian religion. In the body it appears as spine, breath, and pulse; in architecture as base, pillar, and capstone; in language as noun, verb, and meaning. The Djed is stability; Djedi is consciousness of stability; Medjed is the living field that makes stability possible. Together they describe the mechanics of resurrection. When the Djed is raised, Djedi’s word animates it, and Medjed’s unseen motion sustains it. The dead god rises because the field within him still turns.
The symbolic actions in the Westcar narrative match this inner science. When Djedi re-joins the head and body of the goose and ox, he performs the Osirian act of reintegration - the reconciliation of above and below, intellect and matter. When he calms the lions, he harmonises the solar and chthonic forces that define the Egyptian cosmos. His knowledge of the number of the chambers signifies not arithmetic but the awareness of proportion: how many divisions of light are required for the world to remain coherent. Yet he does not disclose them to Khufu, for the king represents manifested order; the mystery must pass to a new house where interpretation, not construction, will rule. Thus the priesthood of Heliopolis is foretold.
This is the moment when Egyptian cosmology changes phase. What had been enacted through stone and ceremony now becomes transmitted through word and text. The Djed, once raised in physical rite, becomes a written glyph; Djedi’s utterance becomes the formula of priests; Medjed’s living field retreats into image and symbol. The Westcar Papyrus records that shift in parabolic form - the movement from direct communion with the field to its management through ritual mediation. The priestly sons born of the Heliopolitan woman are not merely new kings; they are custodians of a new order in which the field will be controlled by words rather than by works.
In the long drift of time, this internal transformation reappears wherever civilisation moves from craft to clerisy. Each epoch retells it in its own idiom. The modern world repeats it in technological myth, where the living axis returns as the Force and its keepers are once again called Djedi. Their powers of restoration, restraint, and perception are the same. They embody the union of Djed and Medjed - the axis and its unseen flow - re-expressed in a culture that builds with light instead of limestone.
Thus the Westcar tale, when read beside the figure of Medjed and the architecture of Giza, yields a complete grammar of renewal. The Djed is the law of form; Djedi is its conscious articulation; Medjed is the field that carries it forward through every retelling. Together they form the living pillar of civilisation - a structure that rises, falls, and is raised again whenever humanity remembers that the measure of the world lies not in power but in alignment.
The axis, the Djed, is stability itself, yet it is shown with legs and feet to signify motion - the ability of the cosmic pillar to walk, to shift its ground from one horizon to another. When the spiritual centre moved from Giza to Heliopolis, the axis could be said to have to ‘walked’; the priests of the sun carried the measure eastward and made a new cult centre for the same light. Medjed is a mobile mound with legs and feet. Yet the tale of Djedi restores the true axis, reminding us that the foundation does not truly move - the living measure endures beneath the sand, awaiting rediscovery. Giza and the Great Pyramid was the original axis.
Djedi’s speech is deliberately enigmatic. He speaks in code and metaphor, employing the language of cipher used by the ancient philosophers: riddling statements that reveal themselves only to those who know the pattern. His manner of expression is the ancestor of initiatory syntax, later echoed in the seemingly inverted speech of Yoda, the sage of Star Wars, who also ‘speaks backward’ so that wisdom may be heard only by those who listen beyond the surface. Both use reversal as a teaching device - the turning of language upon itself to awaken perception, the living echo of the Djed’s own balance between stability and motion.
The portable axis and the biblical echo
What the Bible relates two millennia later is a fictionalised memory of Egypt. The cult axis - symbolised by Medjed - was moved to new centres and each time a temple was raised to the same grammar of measure. The axis walked. The geometry stayed.
In the Hebrew retelling the god is carried in a box called the ark of the covenant. A tribe of initiates move with it from camp to camp until a new axis is fixed at Jerusalem. There Solomon plays the Khufu role - the axis-king who founds the house on archetypal lines.
The Bible is not history in this respect. It is an appropriated recollection of Egyptian culture - a portable axis recast as a portable chest.
Every temple since has repeated the pattern. Inner sanctum on the measure. Outer courts set to the same ratios. Later churches keep the axis by raising a spire or tower - a stone djed - to mark the spine of place.
This typology was formulated under Djoser at Saqqara, perfected at Giza under Khufu Medjedu, and then taught in initiatic code. The Djedi tale preserves the craft knowledge as story. A thousand years later the same memory is reflected in biblical tales of priests carrying the ark and settling at Jerusalem, where the new axis was laid.
One spine. Many names. The measure does not change.
The Axis in Motion – R2-D2 and C-3PO
In the visual language of Star Wars, the archetypes of Egypt appear translated into technology. R2-D2 functions as a mobile axis, a living benben. His compact, cylindrical form is strikingly similar to early images of Medjed - the veiled, pillar-like being whose presence represents unseen motion and hidden agency. R2-D2 is therefore the axis in motion, carrying the thread of the narrative through every generation of the Skywalkers. Lucas originally conceived him as the narrator of the saga, making him the Djed of the tale - the enduring structure through which memory is transmitted.
The name itself encodes the archetype. R2 can be read phonetically as Ar-Tor or Artu, directly aligned with Arthur or Ar-Tor - the ‘high hill’ or ‘axis of the world’ central to this study. In Latin American Spanish, R2-D2 is affectionately called ‘Arturito,’ meaning ‘Little Arthur,’ an unconscious return to that same root. The following character, the Greek Δ (delta), signifies the raised triangle or pyramid, resonant with the archetypal form of the benben. The full name R2-D2 thus reads symbolically as Ar-Tor Delta2 - the small, mobile twin axis of balance and restoration.
Within the story, R2-D2 embodies this function. He is the keeper of codes and keys, the one who restores communication and reactivates systems - precisely the operational role of the living Djed. This echoes the codes and keys implied as the cipher behind Djedi’s role in the Westcar tale. The tale which implies that the axis moved to Heliopolis, but should be looked for at Giza.
R2 is also, at times, a literal smiter (even though the word is falsely derived), echoing the contested interpretation of Medjed as a 'striker” or “projector’ of force. Where the ancient figure was said by Faulkner to “strike from the eye,” R2-D2’s discharge - or electric arc - takes mechanical form: an electrical prod or taser used to stun and repel. These scenes present the ancient function recast through machinery: the pillar as conductor of current, the energy of the field focused into visible discharge.
Beside him stands C-3PO, his golden counterpart - the reflective complement to R2-D2’s silver-blue. In Return of the Jedi, C-3PO is literally worshipped as a god, the articulate emissary of protocol and order. Together they represent the two metals of harmony - gold and silver, the phi and delta whose interplay generates the geometry of the pyramid. They are the comic yet archetypal dyad of proportion: the radiant and the hidden halves of the cosmic axis, through which the Force - the living field - remains in balance.
The Golden God
Gold held a sacred and immutable place in Egyptian cosmology. It was the flesh of the gods, the visible sign of the imperishable and the solar. Texts from the Old Kingdom onwards describe the deities as being made of nbw, pure gold, while the bones of the gods were silver and their hair lapis lazuli. Because gold does not tarnish or corrode, it was regarded as the perfect material expression of immortality and divine radiance. The living king was ‘the Golden Horus,’ the solar embodiment of vitality and power, his body a reflection of the undying sun. The pharaoh’s regalia, from the death mask of Tutankhamun to the gilded sceptres and coffins of the New Kingdom, expressed this doctrine materially: gold was the sun made tangible, eternal life made visible.
In this archetypal role C-3PO mirrors the golden god of Egypt. His entire form is burnished metal, his speech precise, ceremonial, and rule-bound. When he is hailed as a deity by the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, the scene reproduces an ancient image: the polished figure of order, eloquence, and etiquette worshipped as the sun-faced intermediary between heaven and earth. He is the linguistic and luminous half of the pair - a master of the word - a Hu-Bal, lord of breath, therefore is analogous to Atum - the golden manifestation of proportion and law, set beside R2-D2’s hidden, silvery axis. Together they embody the same polarity encoded in Egyptian thought: gold as the immutable solar essence, silver as the reflective lunar field - the two metals whose union defines the geometry of balance and the perfection of the pyramid.
Darth as Daat
The meaning of Daat in the Kabbalistic system is significant, and the figure of Darth Vader is clearly drawn from this archetypal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. However, the Hebrew root itself is derived from the Egyptian, as the evidence shows.
The tale of Djedi is a cipher pointing to the significance of Giza as the original perfected cult centre of ascension through the star gate of Khufu’s Great Pyramid. The recurring allusions to the Sphinx remain the key in the Djedi tale. It therefore remains central, though veiled, in the Star Wars retelling.
Vader plays both the Osirian role of the Father and the Setian role of the dark Lord. He is ultimately redeemed and becomes archetypally the risen Osiris, the pharaonic soul ascended to the light. This accords perfectly with the Egyptian funerary mythos of Osiris becoming perfected with Atum-Ra. Once a Jedi, he becomes Sith - the archetype of the fallen angel, fallen from light into darkness, the priest-lord enforcer for the power of shadow embodied in the Emperor himself.
Exodus 28 is pivotal here. It marks the transition from the Egyptian priestly-initiatic cult to the fictional Hebrew priestly class and provides the bridge into post-biblical Kabbalistic theology, which re-emerges in the Star Wars saga. To trace this transition we must show the derivation through successive strata - from Egyptian Maat to Hebrew Daat to the modern Darth. Again we see the consistent pattern employed throughout the Bible: the inversion or diminishment of the goddess to create a masculine religion administered by a masculine priesthood. Just as YHVH - the Eve aspect of Atum - was absorbed into the masculine YHWH, so too the Ma, the Mother, was consumed into the Da, the Father or “Dad”.
1. Egyptian Field - Ma and Da in the One, the Djed and the Breath in Eternity
In the Memphite–Heliopolitan field Maat and ‘Daat’ are not separate deities but two inseparable states within the One. Ma is measure and balance, the field of order personified as goddess. Da is knowing and articulation, the divine mind made self-aware.
In Egypt the pharaoh-king, such as Khufu, was the Djed-axis of the realm, the steward of the goddess, the living consort whose life served the feminine principle of balance. As Medjedu he was the archetype of that duality - form and ratio, the axis of Egypt and the bridge between heaven and earth - destined after death to return to unity with the heavenly state.
The encoded tale of Djedi explicitly employs Khufu, and therefore Giza, as the archetype of ascension. Giza is the original and archetypal sacred city, the first place of Atum Iuemhept - the One Who Comes in Peace - and typologically the prototype of Jerusalem. Urushalem incorporates Ur, an axis-word denoting “origin” and “peace”. As axis it is the centre, the place of return: just as Jesus returns to Jerusalem with palms, so the eternal Heh sits central with palms, as Moses faced Amalek with Hur and Aaron, a Heh-symbol of the trinity, central pillar within polarity. This is the ancient and continual east–west rhythm of sunrise and sunset; the pillar or Royal Arch traces the sun’s arc through the sky as Horus and Osiris. Hur is Hor - Horus - and Moses comes to rest at Hor, the final sacred mount that recurs eternally. Horus to Osiris, Osiris to Horus: Atum’s epithet Ihuh expresses this same eternity, implicit in the Egyptian Heh and the Hebrew Heh, the Hu, the breath of eternal life.
Atum embodies both, creation by self-realisation, and Djehuti is the intelligence that writes this into the fabric of the world. The Djed pillar is their fixed form, a four-graded vertebral axis from earth to heaven. The twisted-flax sign, the heh of eternity, is the living thread that conducts breath and light through that column. In every rite of “raising the Djed”, the same act is repeated - the lower state lifted into the higher, the two horizons joined.
The Sphinx and Giza are the stone theatre of this initiatic grammar: the body as leonine earth, the head as solar consciousness, the guardian of the horizon. The Dream Stele of Thutmose IV set at the chest is the square pectoral of the monument, the tablet of revelation at the heart-centre, exactly where the priest’s breastpiece rests. The Djedi tale preserves the same Giza axis as cipher: the royal initiate seeks the hidden word of Thoth at Khufu’s horizon, where ascension through the star gate is promised to the rightful line.
2) Hebraic redaction – ephod, ḥōshen, twisted linen, Urim–Thummim, upper–lower language
When the same architecture enters the Torah, it is framed as vestments in Exodus 28. The high-priest is clothed in a portable Djed – a wearable axis of knowledge:
Ephod – the upper binding garment, a shoulder harness that encloses and supports the torso. It is the containment of the upper knowing around the heart and breath. The etymological field fits the Egyptian apron of office – a ritual harness for alignment – more than a modern garment.
Ḥōshen – written חֹשֶׁן. Typology reads ḥo / hu as the uttered breath and shen as the loop of eternity. Hu-Shen is the ring of the creative breath – an eternal circuit – a square pectoral worn directly over the heart and bearing the twelve names. The Egyptian shen-ring protects and eternalises names by enclosing them; the priest’s square replicates that function in fourfold geometry.
Twisted linen – the specification shesh moshzar is not a mere weave. It names the twined flax that in Egypt is the ḥeḥ of eternity – the wick of the undying flame – the conduit through which lower and higher pass. In funerary usage the same flax becomes the resurrection wrapping – the body prepared as wick for ignition.
Urim and Thummim – light and perfection, a polarity of judgement carried within the breastpiece. They are the two currents that pulse through the Djed – a priestly preservation of the Osirian logic in compact form: the measured dual that produces true judgement in the middle.
Upper–lower language – the text’s own vertical grammar is explicit. Taḥton (‘lower’) and ʿelyon (‘upper’) describe both garments and the cosmic waters. Mayim taḥtonim and mayim ʿelyonim are the lower and upper waters divided by the firmament; they are the two halves of knowledge that the priest mediates. The ephod and ḥōshen together make the bridge – lower knowledge rising into higher, higher descending to lower – a human Djed.
All of this is Egyptian typology rewritten – Ma and Da woven as one. Later scholastic glosses have lost the original field: Ma became Da – mother became father – the goddess of measure absorbed into the masculine abstraction of knowledge. But the vestments preserve the older science in their shape and function.
A note on shen / shin and the initiatic blind: in Egyptian shen is ring, loop, eternity – the closed circuit of protection. In later Hebrew usage shin becomes ‘tooth’, a reduction that reads as a deliberate blind. The glyphic form of shin – three uprights rooted in one base – is the triform emission of unity, a flame in three rays. In initiatic grammar it is the lower expression of the upper ring – the unity opened into a triad. That is not linguistic play but typology at work.
3) Kabbalistic re-statement – Daʿat Elyon and Daʿat Taḥton, the pillar in consciousness
Kabbalah later names what Exodus enacts. Daʿat is the hidden knowing that bridges the supernal triad and the manifest seven. Daʿat Elyon is knowledge from above – unity before differentiation. Daʿat Taḥton is knowledge from below – multiplicity to be re-unified. The act of ascent – the lower rising into the higher – is the raising of the pillar. In Egyptian language this is exactly the Djed lifted – the ba-bird ascending the vertebrae – Ma restored through knowing. The priest’s upper and lower garments are the same diagram rendered as cloth and stone.
The position of Daat in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is the region that sits above the Heart centre of Tiphareth, and below Kether. It is a liminal state of knowledge, upper and lower polarity of knowingness. It also represents the divide between initiate and master initiate. The inner state between intellect and gnosis. Upper or higher awareness and lower awareness. What is not explicitly revealed in many Kabblistic organisations is that Tiphareth is the gate within, at the centre, to the union with the spiritual state of the essence. It is at Tiphareth that we symbolically spiral inwards and become one with the source, not the upper aspects of the Tree. The Tippareth represents the goddess ratio, the tree, the outer perception of the measured manifested form The Tree of Life is the Djed, and the Tiphareth is the gate to field that gives form.
Da’at is a symbolic crossing point of the Tree, not a sephiroth itself. Where the ten emanations are united. Yet it is the Ti-Peret that is the gate to the ain soph, or Sophia. The Ti of the Peret or Life of the axis of Ptah. Peret is a form of Peter, thus of Ptah. It is the Mother contained within the Father, and the Mother of the Father - the essence and substrate of ALL manifestation. Identical with Atumist theology of ancient Egypt.
On the Word Ephod and Its Axis
The Hebrew ʾēphōd (אֵפוֹד), the priestly harness of Exodus 28, is not an isolated term. Its root field overlaps with Ephraim (אֶפְרַיִם) and with the Greek ph / φ sound family that later yields phi, the sign of proportion and harmonic ratio. In each case the cluster ph / p / f with the following dental or aspirate carries the sense of emanation, breath, or radiating form. The ephod is therefore more than clothing: it is the ph-axis, the instrument through which divine proportion descends into manifestation. It binds the upper and lower body as the Djed binds heaven and earth.
The same phonemic stream runs through Ephraim, ‘double fruitfulness,’ a name that originally meant the twofold abundance - upper and lower Egypt, visible and invisible. The ephod worn on the breast of Aaron continues that duality in fabric: the harness of the upper world carrying the ḥōshen, the square of measured light. Linguistically and typologically, Ephod and Ephraim both encode the Egyptian notion of P-Ra-im, ‘of Ra within,’ the solar emanation embodied in the ruler. The pharaoh - pr-ʿa, the ‘great house’ - is the living form of the same axis, the Pa-Ra or Phi-Ra principle that joins creation’s two poles.
On the Tree of Life, the true gate of passage is not Daʿat - which is the bridge of knowing - but Tiferet, the heart or solar centre. Tiferet is the locus of harmony and radiant beauty, the sphere where proportion (phi) becomes living consciousness. In Egyptian typology it is the throne of the goddess Sophia - the wisdom that the Greeks later named sophia and the Hebrews rendered as ḥokhmah. Through Tiferet one enters the field of the Ain Soph, the infinite; Daʿat merely describes the operation of awareness along that ascent. The ephod, placed over the chest, occupies that same position: the vesture of the solar heart, the gate through which the initiate passes from measured form into the boundless.
Thus in both language and geometry the ephod carries the memory of the pharaonic axis - the phi-Ra, the ratio of light - made portable as priestly regalia. The garment of the Hebrew high priest is therefore the echo of the Egyptian king’s role as Paru / Pharaoh, the human Djed standing at the midpoint between worlds.
The same ph / p-r root continues in Pharisee - literally ‘the separated ones.’ In Hebrew–Aramaic speech the root prš (פרש) means to set apart, to define, to interpret. The sound cluster carries the same solar axis: ph-ra, light and measure, the articulation of knowledge. The Pharisee is therefore not merely a sectarian label but a title of function: one who stands at the boundary between the profane and the sacred, reading and defining the law.
In that sense the Pharisee is a kohen (כּהֵן) - a priest, scribe, and mediator. The priest’s duties - writing, weighing, keeping the calendar - are the same acts that in Egypt belonged to Thoth / Djehuti, the keeper of measure. The kohen is the living Djed: a vertical link joining divine order to human administration, a recorder and re-aligner of Maʿat. Each biblical pair - John and Jesus, Aaron and Moses - repeats the same polarity of roles: the priestly axis (Thoth / Djed) and the solar initiand (Osiris / Horus) acting together. The Pharisee as kohen-scribe is thus the historical heir of that function, a continuation of the pharaonic office in Hebraic form - the ph-ra-see, the one who sees by the light of Ra.
The Kohen and Darth Vader bearing the Ephod.
The kohen of the Hebrew system is a direct continuation of the vizierial function in Egypt. The word itself (כּהֵן) means ‘one who serves, mediates, or officiates,’ and describes the man who stands beside the king as interpreter of dreams, keeper of ritual order, and counsellor in sacred matters. In the dynastic model he is the Imhotep to Djoser, the Joseph to Pharaoh, the Djedi to Khufu - the sage magician whose knowledge of the hidden laws sustains the throne.
The kohen’s tasks - calculating calendars, interpreting omens, recording decrees, performing purification - are identical to those of the Egyptian ḥaty-ʿ, the vizier. Both are embodiments of Djehuti / Thoth, the divine intellect and scribe of the gods. Each operates as the Djed in human form: the stable axis through which the divine mind informs the human ruler.
In narrative this pair appears repeatedly: Moses and Aaron, Joseph and Pharaoh, John and Jesus. One bears revelation; the other interprets it. The structure is initiatic - the solar candidate guided by the lunar priest, the Horus taught by Thoth. The Westcar tale’s Djedi, the aged magician who instructs Khufu and foretells the future line, is the archetype of this office: the priest-vizier whose command of word and measure bridges heaven and earth. The kohen is his later Hebrew name, the custodian of light and balance, the living record of the eternal pillar.
Note on the Name of the Gate
The word rendered Tiphareth / Tiferet / Tipharet / Tiphareth (תִּפְאֶרֶת) literally means ‘beauty, harmony, radiance.’ Its shifting spellings across traditions are not accidents of translation but marks of transmission.
· The T-P-R consonantal triad links directly to Egyptian Ptah and to the Peret, ‘coming-forth’ or season of emergence.
· The inserted vowels - a, e, i - trace different schools of pronunciation: Tiphareth in the Christian Hermetic orders, Tiferet in the Lurianic and Chassidic line, Tipparet in older transliterations. Each form encodes a nuance of the same centre: the heart-gate of the Tree, the solar sphere of proportion (phi) and beauty.
· The phonetic play between Peret and Ptah reveals the original meaning: Ti-Peret - ‘Life of Ptah’ or ‘Axis of Emergence.’ The later ‘Peter,’ the rock or foundation, is another echo of Peret / Ptah.
For that reason the text preserves the variant spellings. Each belongs to a different phase of the same initiatic current, and together they trace the path from Egyptian Peret through Hebrew Tiphareth to the modern ‘Beauty’ at the heart of the Tree.
The X of IXOS – the Place of Peace
In the geometry of the IXOS field, the X marks the still point of the crossing - the place where opposing currents meet and balance. It is the eye of the storm, the unmoving centre of the vortex, the silence at the heart of creation. In Egyptian this state of equilibrium is voiced in ḥpt - peace, rest, satisfaction - and reappears through the later names Urushalem, Shalom, Salem: all deriving from the same root idea, completion through harmony. ‘Jerusalem,’ long before it became a physical city, was the archetype of that centre - the symbolic place of the axis, the zero-point of Maʿat. As the living Djed, Medjed moves with the axis; the ‘place of peace’ travels with the perfected order itself. Whether the axis stood at Saqqara, Giza, Heliopolis, or later at the hill called Jerusalem, it was always one reality described in shifting geography. The name of peace has always meant the same condition: the stillness at the crossing, the X of IXOS - the eternal heart of the field.
The X itself - two lines meeting in perfect balance - has always been the emblem of the axis. In Egyptian art the major gods bear it as the red cross, the sign of equilibrium and the seal of Maʿat. It marks the place where the currents of heaven and earth interlock, the fixed centre within motion. The same crossing lies between the stars of Orion, the celestial Djed, the knot of light through which the soul ascends. In Gardner’s sign list the hieroglyphic X meaning ‘village’ or ‘enclosure’ expresses the same idea: the established axis, the secure point of order. Medjed, the veiled one, carries this geometry upon his body - the red-cross sash, the bow of eternity, drawn diagonally across his form. It is the living X of balance, the binding of upper and lower, the sign of peace. The motif re-emerges everywhere: the ot-mark on Cain, the blooded X on the lintels at Passover, the cross traced on the brow at baptism. Each act replays the same Egyptian gesture of alignment - the fixing of the centre, the union of opposites, the moment where the field becomes still. The cross is therefore not a symbol of death but of the axis established: the eternal knot of Medjed’s sash, the meeting of heaven and earth, the visual essence of Maʿat, harmony and peace made visible.
UR is a Drift Cultural root word, consonant with AR as the axis, the X. UR is always a word denoting origin, and as such in any cycle it is always the destination on the journey of the hero, in the archetypal myth. Abraham of Ur of the Chaldees, for example. Ar-Tor is the UR of the Torah. It is the place of central establishment, from which all journeys, to which all returns. The road to UR is via its inverse: RU. The destination of completion is Ra. Atum Ra is the original duality of the Singular Creator god that became YHWH. As such, the Urim, of Exodus 28 denotes the origin, and Thummim, is Tum (as in Atum) the completion.
Thum is Tum, which indicates the unity of polarity. It became the name Thomas, who was designated Didymus: the twin twin. It is also the root of Tammuz, the archetypal cycleic god who comes and goes and comes again to renew life in the eternal cycle of Creation. The Hebrew Bible also borrows from the Babylonian mythos, due to the period of exile that the early cult founders, but the Bible remains firmly rooted in the Egyptian. Eventually, all would be fused into the Roman Bible, and all Ru-roads would lead to Rome, as the new axis of power and ru-le. This became the new X, the new Chi, of Ro - the Chi Rho - but it all began near Cairo, at Giza.
Exoteric myth is for the masses. The Bible, for example is a series of tales as code for the inner teachings of the initiate order. Later these orders became known as Masonic, Rosicrucian, Kabbalistis etc. A continuation of initiatic knowledge as a direct descent from Egyptian cosmology - which the Illuminati retained, but which was not deemed suitable for the flock.
4) The modern archetype – Darth as Daʿat
The modern myth recasts the axis in black. Daath is heard in English as Darth, and in narrative he occupies Daʿat Taḥton – knowledge severed from light – until redeemed into Daʿat Elyon. Archetypally one hears both Daath and Da’ath, and we see a black shadow, which subliminally fuse together in the psyche of the viewer. The costume is not incidental; it is an inventory of priestly and Egyptian survivals:
The pectoral – a rectangular chest piece centred on the sternum, an array of lights arranged in grids. It is the ḥōshen re-expressed – a twelvefold logic carried on the heart – and it sits where the Thutmose IV stele sits on the sphinx – the square of revelation at the axis. The equivalence of placement matters: the ‘between the paws’ phrasing has obscured the fact that the stele is mid-sternum on the monument, precisely where the pectoral belongs.
The vestment – an upper harness and a flowing lower garment – the ephod over a tunic – fastened by cords that function as conduits. The twisted tubes of respiration are the life-lines that join upper and lower. The whole is a wearable Djed.
The face – a mask of terror. Typologically it is the sphinx face inverted – Khafre’s calm turned to awe – the defaced stone remembered as a mechanical visor. The original appellation ‘Horus of the Horizon’ was masked as the Father of Dread. The deliberate mutilation of the sphinx face through later rivalries finds an eerie echo in the narrative: the kingly face destroyed and replaced by the dread mask of power. The headdress silhouette persists.
The function – mediator between an unseen sovereign and the realm, executor of judgement, bearer of the fatal breath. He is the Aaronic counterpart in shadow, the lower priest who must die to rise. His arc is the Osirian formula exactly – Horus fallen into Setian polarity, reconciled as Osiris, leaving the son to rise. The final unmasking is the raising of the Djed – the restoration of Ma and Da as one.
This is not to argue derivation from a film but to show continuity of form. The Amalek scene in Exodus – Moses upheld by Aaron and Hur / Ḥor – is the same geometry: a central pillar upheld by two supports – the two mountains of the horizon – victory while the axis stands. The Royal Arch of later craft tradition extends the same diagram into a half-circle – the sun’s course from rise to set – Horus to Osiris and back to Horus. The grammar does not change. Mythmaking continues because the architecture of initiation is perennial. Thus in the Gospels Jacob’s son Joseph became father of another Joseph - IuSa/Yeshua, who was said to have a brother named Jacob/rendered James. This is the eternal cycle of return as a generational exoteric saga, neither historical nor accidental.
In the Egyptian canon the gesture of upraised arms is not merely supplication but the hieroglyph of the ka, the life-force or vital double. The twin upstretched limbs of the glyph are the same form that Moses assumes on the hill: the living sign of energy held between heaven and earth. When Aaron and Hur support his arms, they are literally sustaining the ka of the people - maintaining the current of vitality that flows through the central axis. In reliefs of offering or resurrection the god or king is shown with this same posture, the arms forming the open gate through which the sun’s power passes. The battle with Amalek therefore becomes a ritual raising of life itself: as long as the ka is upheld, order and vitality prevail; when it falls, chaos gains ground. The sign is the human counterpart of the Heh and the Djed - the upheld life-breath of eternity made visible in flesh.
5) On taḥra / taḥton and the vesture of dual knowing
A final note on the linguistic survivals that stitch the layers. The obscure taḥra of Exodus – sometimes glossed as collar – sits next to taḥton, the lower. In Pentateuchal usage taḥton exists from the first verses – the lower waters – mayim taḥtonim – below the firmament. Its partner ʿelyon names the upper. The priestly vestments are thus written inside the cosmic division. That the ephod’s collar covers the shoulders and chest and is bound by gold cords simply repeats the older Egyptian convention – upper knowledge descending upon lower. We do not need to force a direct borrowing to recognise the cosmic grammar embedded in the words: lower and upper are functional halves of one Djed.
Synthesis
All of these strata – Egyptian, Hebraic, Kabbalistic, modern – maintain one act: to set the pillar upright. Daʿat is the process, Djed the form, Maʿat the equilibrium. The ephod and ḥōshen enact it in cloth; the Thutmose stele fixes it in stone; the Amalek scene dramatizes it as upheld arms; the film masks it in breath and black iron. The names change. The geometry does not. The modern spectator reading a black mask and a square pectoral is looking, unknowingly, at Giza, at Exodus 28, and at the hidden vertical of the Tree of Life – a continuous initiatic axis whose grammar was first written in the Nile’s stone.
The Grail and the Seventeenth Book – The Western Resurrection of the Axis
In Le Morte d’Arthur the Grail cycle culminates, significantly, in Book XVII – the number of the perfected ascent, told as Galahad’s tale. As Book of the Dead 17 sets forth the resurrection of Osiris through Atum’s unity and the seven spirits, Malory’s seventeenth book presents the perfected soul through Galahad. It is Chapter 17 of Book 17 that announces the closing tale of Sir Galahad.
In the Egyptian canon, Book of the Dead 17 declares: ‘I am Atum when he was alone in the waters; I am Ra when he came into being; I am the Cat who split the Ished tree in Heliopolis.’ It speaks of the seven spirits that stand before the throne and of Rostau, the necropolis of Giza – the gateway of the passages. The text is both cosmology and ritual, a map of rebirth through measure. Malory’s seventeenth book performs the same function for the Western mind: the Grail cycle becomes the Christian–Arthurian expression of the Osirian mystery, retelling in chivalric form the passage of the justified soul through the axis of light.
The Perfected Knight as Osiris and Horus
Galahad is described as the most perfect knight in the world, the one made clean by grace, ‘who shall achieve the Holy Grail.’ He is the Horus of this system – the son of light and renewer of the kingdom – yet also the Osiris who must die to the world to be made whole. He is the equivalent of Jesus the resurrected god. His life mirrors the Egyptian initiatory formula:
• Purity and justification – his heart weighed and found true in the trials of chastity and compassion.
• Miraculous healing – he restores the maimed and the blind, the mark of the divine physician.
• Association with the well – a hydronymic goddess sign of the great sea (gal, gala), the goddess field of renewal.
• Union of gold and silver – the Grail and the sword, the twin metals of sun and moon.
• Ascension through measure – the vision of the Grail and his translation to heaven, the raising of the Djed.
Malory names him ‘the good knight made clean by grace’; the papyrus of Ani calls Osiris ‘the good being justified by truth.’ The formula is identical.
The Grail Vessel as the Box of Thoth
The Holy Grail is the Western continuation of the flint box of Djedi – the container of divine measure. In Malory it is of gold and silver, borne by angels, veiled and unveiled in order. It holds light, not liquid: the eucharistic field of renewal. Like the pyramid’s sarcophagus it is a vessel of ascent, not entombment – the living measure of resurrection.
The Seven Archetypes and the Company of the Grail
Seven principal figures participate in the Grail miracle: Galahad, Percival, Bors, Lancelot, Nacien, Joseph (of Arimathea’s line), and the hermit scribe. These correspond to the seven spirits of Book of the Dead 17 and to the seven stars of Orion and the seven of the Bull’s Thigh. Three knights are imprisoned, mirroring the three belt stars confined within the four corners of Orion. The three sojourners are equivalent to the three kings or magi seeking Jesus at the House of Bread - the three belt stars pointing to the Goddess star Sothis/Sirius. Galahad restores the sword, counterpart of Orion’s hanging blade – the same sword that wounded Joseph’s thigh, repeating the ancient myth of the severed ham or foreleg that becomes the polar Bull’s Thigh (Ursa Major). The company of the Grail thus enacts the celestial geometry itself.
That the Great Pyramid’s shafts and the Giza plateau are aligned with Orion and the pole is already attested here in Christianised form, long before Robert Bauval’s modern demonstration.
Gold, Silver, Candle, Cloth, and Bread
In the closing chapters, the destination of the Grail at Sarras unfolds with unmistakably Egyptian imagery. Within the temple stands ‘a table of silver and upon it the holy vessel covered with red samite, and before it a man in the likeness of a bishop kneeling, and about him many angels.’
• The silver table and red covering are the lunar and solar metals – Isis and Osiris reconciled.
• The bread upon the table is the ḥetep offering, the loaf of life placed before Osiris – the breath of Hu leavened in the field.
• The cloth is the folded flax and twisted linen of embalming – the veil of the goddess. The angels lifting it repeat the priestly raising of the veil over the benben.
• The candles are the akhu, the shining spirits, the same lights that guide the soul through the Duat. Each wick of twisted flax is the anointed Djed, the life and light that rises from the mummy linen – the kr-st, the anointed body.
When the knights come to the ship of the Grail, they enter the same archetypal vessel as the solar bark of Ra – the night-ark that carries Osiris through the Duat toward the dawn. During this voyage Galahad is urged to lie down within the ship, as the embalmed Osiris is laid upon the bier. The motion of the craft through the dark sea is the movement of the Orion bark across the celestial waters, the soul ferried within the measured chamber. The instruction to recline is the ceremonial preparation for translation, the symbolic death that precedes illumination. The boat itself is the moving Djed, the portable axis that bridges the worlds of matter and spirit.
Galahad becomes King at Sarras - as Osiris was seen as a King/Pharoah in Egypt in the later legends, and Jesus was the King of the Jews, at Jerusalem, born in declared such at Bethlehem - both end and beginning of the same cycle. Later, at Sarras, the Grail miracle unfolds. Light floods the temple, a voice calls, ‘Come thou servant of Jesus Christ, and thou shalt see what thou hast desired so long.’ Galahad kneels and receives communion from the vessel; his ascent follows the earlier rite enacted on the sea. The voyage and the miracle are one continuum – the funerary sailing and the resurrection of the Osirian soul, the passage of the justified through the ark of night into the field of stars.
Burial at Sarras – The Tomb of Ascension
Galahad’s body is buried ‘in the spiritualities, and men saw by night the same hand come from heaven and take the vessel and the spear and bear them up to heaven.’ This is Osiris at Rostau, the ascent through the pyramid’s passage. The tomb is not death but transmutation. The Grail and spear – gold and silver, light and form – are withdrawn to heaven, sealing the rite.
The city of Sarras is the western Rostau; its name echoes s-ra, ‘the mouth of the sun.’ The angels bearing the relics are the guardians of the shafts; the upward motion of light through the folded cloth is the soul sailing through the corridors of measure. The boat that carries Galahad from Britain to Sarras is the same ark of the night, the solar bark that ferries Ra and Osiris through the waters of the Duat. His instruction to ‘lie down’ within it mirrors the embalmer’s command to the god before the resurrection. As above, so below – the burial at Sarras is the voyage to Sah-Ra, the ascent to the Orion field.
The Continuum of the Axis
Malory’s finale completes the same sequence traced in Egypt:
Saqqara – the first stair of Atum. The original Ptah/Atum/Adam/iusa/Joseph/Jesus myth.
Giza – the perfected Djed of Osiris.
Sarras – the Grail temple of the West, the Orion ark of souls where the axis is Christianised yet remains Egyptian in essence.
Heliopolis – the codified solar theology. A result of the axis moved to another cult centre.
The seventeenth book of Malory thus mirrors the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead: each recounts the justification of the soul, its union with the divine, and its ascent through the pillar of light. The Grail vessel, the silver table, the candle, cloth, and bread are the same instruments of measure and restoration seen from Saqqara to Giza. Galahad is the Osiris–Jesus–Imhotep figure perfected, the ‘good being justified by truth.’
In this way The Morte d’Arthur preserves within medieval language the full geometry of the ancient mystery – the raising of the Djed, the reconciliation of gold and silver, and the sailing of the justified through the chamber of measure. The Grail is the living continuation of the pyramid, and the seventeenth book its final chapter: the Western Book of the Dead 17, where the axis once again speaks through story and the hidden chamber of Thoth opens in words of light.
If Thoth’s wisdom is written into the very chambers and shafts and geometry of the Giza complex, then here is our legendary ‘Hall of Records’ and location of the source of later speculation of the so-called ‘Emerald Tablets’ of Thoth. This would be later code for the Grail as The Philosopher’s stone, the alchemical hieros gamos of Osiris and Isis encoded in stone at the Great Pyramid. The axis as the Medjed of Medjedu/Khufu, servant of Ma’at.
All of which echo the Giza imagery inherent in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17 – a pattern discernible to those with eyes to see. The initiatic myth and the mathematics of light move forward through sacred architecture and literature, re-expressed in later mythologies. Just as the Star Wars saga carries these motifs in recurring cycles – Father to Son, season to season, Obi-Wan to Vader to Luke, and then the renewal with the new Horus-Ra figure of Rey against the Setian aspect of Ben (Son) Solo / Kylo Ren; Luke himself becoming Osiris, withdrawn in hermitage before ascending in light from his island sanctuary – so too does the Bible retell the Egyptian tale in successive generations: Ptah-Pater-Father to Atum-Adam, the Iusa-Joseph of Yeshua, Jacob to Joseph, Moses to Joshua, and onward.
Malory preserves the same Osirian grammar in the mirrored pair of Arthur and Galahad, each completing the other’s cycle – the isle of Avalon for Arthur and Sarras for Galahad, the lake for Arthur and the well for Galahad. Every retelling is a translation of the same field structure: the descent and restoration of the light, the dying and rising god, the measured axis that renews the world. We are simply hearing the echoes of Memphite theology – carried from the early temples through the later Egyptian cults, reframed by the Ptolemaic redactors, absorbed into the Bible, re-emerging in the medieval romances, and reaching its modern expression in Star Wars.
The Solar Cat, the Hidden Box, and the True Iunu
In Book of the Dead 17 the initiate declares, ‘I am the cat who split the Ished tree in Heliopolis.’ Egyptologists translate the line literally, yet its cosmological meaning is exact: the cat is the solar lion-form of Ra at dawn, the bright-eyed Mau who slays the serpent of night and frees the first light. To ‘split the Ished tree’ is to cleave the horizon itself - the act of sunrise, when the twin peaks of the akhet divide to release the orb of the sun. The Ished (Persea) Tree, the tree of life and of divine record, was said to stand in Iunu, the City of the Sun. In its branches perched the Bennu bird, the phoenix of rebirth, and on its leaves the gods inscribed the years of each king’s reign. The tree’s fruit contained the numbers of divine order, the same ratios that Khufu sought from Djedi. To eat of it was to partake of measure - to live by Ma’at.
Yet the Westcar tale uses Iunu not as a place name but as a cipher. Iunu, ‘the Pillar City,’ describes not the temple of priests at Heliopolis but the true pillar of the sun - the Great Pyramid at Giza. The narrative’s setting in Heliopolis masks the real location of the flint box of Thoth, just as later texts veiled Giza under layers of theology. Decoded, the flint box is the granite sarcophagus within the King’s Chamber, the vessel of sacred number; the ‘secret chambers’ are the measured spaces of the pyramid whose proportions express phi and the 3-4-5 triangle. The statement that the box lies ‘where the king’s name is inscribed’ identifies it exactly: above that chamber, in the relieving vaults, the quarry marks bear the cartouche of Khufu (Medjedu). The code therefore points directly to Giza, where the head of terror - the Sphinx - stands sentinel before the horizon of Khufu.
The Sphinx itself is the petrified solar cat of Book of the Dead 17. Its leonine body and human head enact eternally the cat’s cutting of the Ished tree: the division of darkness and light, the dawn fixed in stone. Facing due east, it performs the same daily gesture that the text attributes to Ra - the clawing of the serpent, the opening of the horizon, the birth of the day. The monument is thus the permanent form of the ritual that once took place in the temples of Iunu: the solar cat striking the tree, the Bennu rising from its branches, the renewal of the world. Beneath that gaze lies the flint box - the sarcophagus that holds the sacred measure - exactly as the Westcar narrative conceals it beneath the code of Heliopolis.
So the ‘cat who split the Ished tree,’ the ‘flint box of Thoth,’ and the ‘Face of Terror’ are all facets of one geometry: the pillar of light breaking through matter. The true Iunu is not the priestly quarter on the Delta but Giza, the physical Heliopolis, where the stone pyramid replaced the tree and the Sphinx became the eternal solar cat guarding the chamber of divine number.
Part 4 – The Archetypes Re-cast: Characters of Star Wars as Egyptian Functions
When George Lucas and his collaborators set out to design the mythic structure of Star Wars, they drew consciously upon comparative myth, Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the universal grammar of initiation. What they rediscovered - whether through scholarship or intuitive recurrence - was the Egyptian pattern in modern costume. The same cosmic triad that underlies the Westcar tale - form, sage, and field - appears again through a gallery of characters whose functions are recognisably Egyptian.
Luke Skywalker stands in the place of Horus (Heru), the son who rises to restore balance. His rite of passage echoes the Osirian sequence: the loss of the father, descent into shadow, and final ascent as light-bearer. His mastery of the Force mirrors Horus’s alignment with Ma’at, the principle of proportion.
Anakin Skywalker, later Darth Vader, unites the roles of Osiris and Set. He is both the luminous creator and the destroyer who falls into separation. His title ‘Darth’ - a corruption of ‘dark’ and da’at, knowledge - marks the priestly inversion of understanding into power. Clad in a funerary mask and sustained by mechanical breath, he becomes a modern mummified god: life imprisoned in form, animation without renewal. His return to light at death completes the Osirian arc - disintegration followed by reconciliation through the son.
Obi-Wan Kenobi embodies the Djedi archetype in its purest form. His serenity, restraint, and command of resurrection by disappearance are direct counterparts to the sage of Westcar. Like Djedi, he refuses to yield knowledge prematurely and vanishes into luminous continuity rather than death. His disembodied voice guiding the hero from beyond is the living utterance, Hu, that once animated the temples of Egypt - the voice of alignment, not command.
Yoda corresponds to the composite wisdom of Ptah and Thoth: craftsman and scribe, articulation and reflection. Like Obi Wan, he also embodies the role of Djedi. His green complexion evokes fertility and renewal, the hue of Osiris reborn; his reversed syntax mirrors the priestly speech of paradox by which initiates taught balance through inversion. His home in the swamp of Dagobah reprises the Egyptian creation-myth in which the primeval mound rises from the watery Nun: the world reborn in the heart of decay.
Leia Organa, twin of Luke, is Isis restored. She carries lineage, memory, and the regenerative power of the feminine field. Her role is not subsidiary but foundational: she preserves the thread of continuity, the flax of renewal. Her very name suggests the phoneme ia, the feminine suffix of divinity, and organon, instrument or structure - the goddess as living order. Her link with Medjed is implicit: veiled, enduring, and yet the source of illumination for the rebirth of the kingdom.
Padmé Amidala mirrors Nephthys, the shadow-sister, whose love bridges life and death. Her death in childbirth and her name - containing the sounds of maat and dal, measure and gate - make her the aperture through which the next generation enters. She embodies the necessary sacrifice that renews the field. These are also traits of Isis, the Holy Mother - later to be embodied in Mary mother of Jesus.
Emperor Palpatine is the archetype of Apep, the serpent of chaos disguised as authority, or the late-period priesthood of Amun who turned theology into control. His face, distorted by his own lightning, is the reflection of the field corrupted by self-will. Where Ma’at is balance through proportion, Palpatine embodies false order through domination - the priest who has mistaken the formula for the truth it once represented. He is also a Sethian archetype.
The Force itself is the feminine essence of Medjed: the veiled, omnipresent field that ‘binds the galaxy together.’ Invisible, impartial, yet responsive to alignment, it is Isis in her fluid form - the continuum of life. The distinction between light and dark sides is not moral but functional: outward and inward motion within the same medium. The Jedi are those who feel its torsion and act in resonance with it.
The lightsabre is the modern Pedjeshes or measuring rod of the temple surveyor, the straight line of light drawn from hidden source through hand and breath. The weapon of the Jedi is a geometrical instrument - the axis made visible. The sound of its activation imitates the aspirated breath of Hu, the utterance that awakens form. When two sabres cross, they recreate the ancient sign of the ankh: life through the intersection of forces.
The flaming sword or sword of light is among the oldest mythic archetypes known. In Egypt it was the radiant sceptre of Horus and the Osirian weapon that overcame the bull of opposition - the beast of inertia - to restore Ma’at. In Mesopotamia it appears as the blade of Ninurta that cleaves the dragon of chaos, later echoed in the archangel Michael’s sword of flame that defeats the serpent of the Apocalypse. In the Celtic world, Lugh Lámfada, the ‘long-armed light-bringer,’ wields the shining spear that never misses its mark - another measure of light and precision. Arthur’s Excalibur, drawn from the stone of the earth, and its counterpart Galatine, the sword of Gawain, continue the same principle: the rightful hand aligning with the axis to channel the fire of heaven. In Persian and Vedic traditions, the heroes Arjuna and Mithra bear luminous weapons of truth; in Norse myth the god Freyr’s sword flashes of its own accord at the world’s end. Each is a manifestation of the same archetype - the straight line of divine proportion cutting through the darkness of confusion.
The sword, in every language, is light organised into purpose. It is the visible geometry of will. When it burns in the hand of the just, it is not an instrument of destruction but of alignment, the extension of the Djed into motion. The Star Wars sabre revives that lineage consciously: the modern initiate’s tool of measure, the pure beam of field coherence guided by breath and balance. Its bearer is judged not by conquest but by harmony, for to lose the centre is to fall into the dark current of power without proportion.
The entire narrative of Star Wars unfolds upon an Egyptian grammar of being. The rebellion against empire repeats the tension between living knowledge and the priestly state that first emerged in Heliopolis. The ‘balance of the Force’ sought by Luke is the restoration of Ma’at - the dynamic equilibrium of opposites.
Seen in this light, Star Wars functions as a global initiatory rite disguised as entertainment. Millions participate unconsciously in the ancient festival of the Djed each time the story is retold. The cinema, darkened like the inner chamber of the pyramid, reveals the myth that began as limestone and incantation now literally is light emerging from darkness, field revealing form. And the play, is the son redeeming the father. Order restored from chaos. Life from death.
The persistence of these characters across generations of audience confirms their archetypal origin. They are not inventions of a single writer but manifestations of a collective memory that extends back to the banks of the Nile.
Luke is Horus who grows to become Osiris. He is the Sky Walker by day as the solar path, and by night as Orion, the eternal hunter of light through darkness. He is the once and future messianic king – Ar-Tor, the archetype of order and return, the eternal heart of the axis who rises again in every age. In him the field and the form are reconciled; the Djed stands; Ma’at is restored.
Part 5 – The Priestly Inversion and the Modern Rebalance
The Westcar Papyrus foreshadows not only the mythic line of descent but also its distortion. The very tale that celebrated the sage’s restraint and the field’s harmony also recorded the first transfer of sacred authority from the living king to a clerical order. When Djedi defers to the unborn sons of a priestess of Heliopolis, the text signals a structural inversion: the initiation of what will become the rule of the priesthood. From that moment onward, the custodians of the Djed cease to be the builders of form and become interpreters of text. The living science of alignment hardens into theology.
Throughout the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, this transformation accelerated. The raising of the Djed, once a living act of renewal, became a pageant performed by officiants; the utterances of resurrection were copied and recited rather than lived. The priests of Heliopolis and Thebes consolidated land and labour under divine charters, their rituals codifying power through ownership of the sacred word. Egypt’s original harmony - an open dialogue between the seen and the unseen - narrowed into doctrine. The symbolic lexicon that had once described natural reciprocity between sky and earth became a system of entitlement.
This inversion did not destroy the field but concealed it. The Medjed remained present, veiled within language, transmuted from living experience into metaphor. The cosmic order was no longer something perceived but something decreed. By the New Kingdom the temples themselves were closed systems - repositories of precise formulas guarded by hierarchies of interpreters. As in Mesopotamia, Babylon, and later Judea, the divine measure that once unified priest, craftsman, and ruler was replaced by text, law, and commentary. The Westcar myth was fulfilled: the measure had indeed passed to the sons of the priestess, but what they inherited was not the living light, only its record.
Yet the field does not vanish. Its energy withdraws, waiting for another expression. Across the centuries, the same process unfolded wherever the field was institutionalised. In the Persian empires, the sacred fire of Atar became the prerogative of a caste. In Israel, the Ark was hidden behind curtains, its lightning power mediated by a single tribe. In Christendom, the cross and the eucharist replaced the living Djed and the anointing of the krst. Each stage followed the same trajectory: from communion to control, from resonance to regulation.
By the time of the Roman imperium the priesthood had become indistinguishable from state authority. The Christos - the anointed axis of renewal - was recast as a single historical figure, his cosmic symbolism bound to the edicts of emperors. What had once been a universal process became a weapon of creed. The word that had meant alignment was turned into demand. Thus the cycle that began with Khufu’s humble search for the measure of Thoth culminated in councils and inquisitions claiming to define the measure of the world.
Nevertheless, the archetype endures. Every cycle of enclosure eventually gives rise to its counterpoint - a return of the field through new media. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific age each loosened the priestly grip by recovering fragments of the lost language of proportion. Geometry, optics, and harmonic theory became the new theologies, though their exponents rarely recognised their spiritual inheritance. The Medjed was returning through mathematics and light.
The Star Wars saga reflects with uncanny precision the civilizational process traced throughout Return of the Storm God: the descent of a balanced, life-affirming order into priestly hierarchy and imperial control. In its earliest form, the galaxy is governed by the Republic and the Jedi Order, whose foundations rest upon duality in harmony. The Force is understood as both masculine and feminine, active and receptive, light and dark held in dynamic equilibrium. The Jedi are not conquerors but custodians of Ma’at - keepers of balance through awareness of the field. Even the presence of female rulers such as Padmé Amidala and the later Leia Organa recalls Egypt’s earlier age, when queens and priestesses shared power with kings and the cosmic feminine was openly revered.
Yet, as in the history of Egypt, balance gives way to control. The priesthood hardens into bureaucracy; the Jedi Council becomes political and divisive; and the Republic, once founded on dialogue, sinks into intrigue and corruption. The shadow rises through the ambitions of men who mistake domination for order. The Emperor, cloaked and omnipotent, embodies the culmination of this process: the priest-king whose claim to divinity rests on fear. He is the embodiment of Set, the spirit of separation and self-interest that twists the search for knowledge into the lust for power. Around him gather the Sith, the series of black magician lackeys of hierarchy, who embody the priestly inversion of the living science - the transformation of the Force into instrument rather than harmony.
The parallel with Egypt’s own decline is exact. The Old Kingdom’s partnership of king and priest, earth and sky, evolved into the competing factions of temple and throne. Over time the self-interested elites consolidated power through the language of divinity, claiming access to the gods while withholding it from the people. The Pharaoh became a god by decree rather than realisation; the priests of Amun became arbiters of heaven and earth. The same pattern unfolds in the Galactic Empire, where the Emperor’s face becomes the only sanctioned image of authority, and the Force, once universal, is reduced to the weapon of a cult.
Against this tide stand the younger Skywalkers - the carriers of the old light, the remnant of the natural order. They are the humanised heirs of the field tradition, the ones who remember that the Force is not a hierarchy but a continuum. Through them the hope of restoration endures, just as in ancient Egypt the mysteries of Isis and Osiris survived within the popular religion long after the state cults had ossified. The recurring theme of A New Hope is therefore not rebellion alone but recollection - the remembrance of what balance once was. The original saga closes with that same message: that no empire, priesthood, or ideology can imprison the field forever. The living axis will rise again, and the Force, like the Nile, will find its course. The spirit of the saga is encapsulated by Leia in The Last Jedi whan she explains: “Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you see it, you’ll never make it through the night.”
In our own age the process continues. The technological civilisation of the twentieth century has recreated, almost unconsciously, the temples of light that once stood along the Nile. The cinema, with its projectors and lenses, its chambers of darkness and illuminated horizons, has become the medium through which collective myth finds renewal. Here, in the global myth of Star Wars, the archetype finally rebalances. The priestly inversion is undone not by rebellion against religion but by rediscovery of its original grammar: alignment, not obedience; proportion, not dogma.
The Jedi are initiates of that restoration. They live by Ma’at in its purest form - balance of opposites, respect for the field. Their order, like that of the earliest Egyptian temple-builders, is dedicated to study of motion, light, and breath. Yet even within the story the danger of inversion reappears: the Jedi Council becomes bureaucratic, their temple a citadel of rules, and from that rigidity the dark side is always a potential. The Jedi remain ever vigilant of that temptation to become self-serving and to wield supreme power unjustly. The old adage that ‘power corrupts’ is always in the minds of the Jedi council.
The modern rebalance is therefore not confined to film or philosophy; it marks a broader human awakening. The rediscovery of unity in physics, biology, and consciousness studies mirrors the old Egyptian synthesis of nature and spirit. The quantum field, the torsional matrix, the light-body, and the mythic Force are different languages for the same insight: the universe is participatory, coherent, and alive. After four and a half millennia, the lessons of history are still being taught in the oldest archetypes.
The Cinema as Temple of Light
In ancient Egypt, initiation was a process of light emerging from darkness. The aspirant entered the temple at dusk, was led through chambers ever more confined, and at the innermost sanctuary witnessed the dawning of a single flame or the shaft of sunlight striking a hidden shrine. The architecture itself enacted resurrection: descent, immersion, and ascent. Every surface was calculated to receive light at a precise moment, turning stone into revelation. The entire nation was, in effect, a theatre of illumination.
Our modern civilisation has built its temples of light anew. They are not of limestone but of glass and steel, yet their geometry and function are the same. The cinema is the direct descendant of the temple. Its darkened interior, silent audience, and single source of radiance mirror the conditions of the ancient rite. The screen is a luminous horizon, a modern Akhet where light arises between twin pillars of sound. The beam of the projector is the resurrected Djed: a column of living brilliance issuing from a hidden source through an ordered aperture, projecting form into the void.
When the film begins, the ritual resumes. The audience, seated in collective stillness, enter the same condition as initiates awaiting revelation. The lights dim, a hush falls, and the world disappears. Then light moves through darkness, shaping images that evoke memory and emotion, renewing the link between the visible and the invisible. The cinema is not merely entertainment; it is a continuation of the oldest act of communion between human and cosmos.
In Star Wars, this relationship is made explicit. The first words that appear - ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ - are a direct echo of the Egyptian ‘tales of yore,’ the prelude to mythic time. The story that follows is a deliberate descent into archetype, structured as initiation: the call, the ordeal, the death, and the return. The luminous weapons, the cosmic struggle of light and dark, the rebirth of balance - all are hieroglyphs projected in motion. The viewer participates unconsciously in the same psychological alignment that the ancient initiate underwent by candle and chant.
The ritual is universal. Across the planet, billions gather in these artificial caves of darkness to watch the play of light. They do so willingly, expectantly, and in reverent silence. The collective mind has recreated the conditions of its own renewal. The cinema has become the global sanctuary of the field - an accidental yet perfect restoration of the Egyptian principle that consciousness is kindled through light in darkness.
Every element of the cinematic experience repeats the ancient symbolism. The ticket is the token of passage; the entrance is the gate of the underworld; the aisles are the processional ways.
The significance extends beyond architecture and ritual. In psychological terms, the cinema performs the same function the temple once did: it re-aligns the individual with the archetype. The viewer emerges changed, if only for a moment, sensing a larger order beneath the chaos of daily life. The emotions stirred by the film are modern equivalents of ancient catharsis - the release and reintegration of psychic energies. Through the projection of light, the inner world is purified and renewed.
The Star Wars saga, with its explicit invocation of the Force, serves as one of the purest example of this unconscious restoration. The narrative is set in space, yet its true setting is the interior of the human soul. The galaxy far away is the cosmos within. Each time the story is retold, the same archetypes are reawakened: the call to balance, the descent into shadow, the emergence of light. The modern audience, whether aware or not, participates in the raising of the Djed. The ritual is no longer confined to priests or kings; it has become democratic, collective, and global.
This is why the myth of the Sky-Walker resonates so profoundly. It is not escapism but remembrance - the reawakening of the oldest human intuition, that we are beings of light clothed in matter, walking between worlds. The cinema simply provides the modern sanctuary where that truth can be experienced once more. In the beam that cuts the darkness of the theatre.
The Return of the Field
I can trace the moment the archetypes took root in me. I was about five years old, sitting in a cinema darkened like the inner chamber of a temple. It was a local showing to which my parents took me, and I still vividly recall my grandmother expressing a strange phrase, how it was ‘half-pst-one’ by the time we returned. My little baby sister passed from my grandmother’s arms into my mother’s, and the whole evening remains a magical and indelible memory.
Earlier, on the screen, Charlton Heston as Moses had raised his staff and the sea divided. I remember the shudder of awe that moved through the audience as walls of water stood upon either side. He had bested the evil empire and rescued his people from bondage through demonstrations of magic and miracle on behalf of the Creator. The voice of God on Sinai and the creation of the Tablets sent my young mind into raptures. I did not yet know the story of Jesus, nor could I distinguish Bible from myth, yet I understood instinctively that this was a pattern older than any religion - the same act I would later find carved into the pylons of Egypt: the human figure commanding the elements, bridging heaven and earth.
It was in the cinema that the Bible first revealed itself to me not as literal history but as encoded myth, and through it the deeper Egyptian source - the geometry of power, the harmony of the field. The light of the projector was my first burning bush, the parting sea my first perception of natural geometry. These experiences were initiations unrecognised at the time, yet their effect was permanent. The sacred stories, projected as moving light, became seeds of recognition that would one day lead back to the temples of stone and the equations of the field.
Cinema, television, and now the digital screen continue this work. They are the modern vessels through which archetypes are transmitted, the living successors of the mural and the papyrus. Every child who watches a story of hero and threshold, of descent and return, participates in an ancient initiation.
When I encountered Tommy, the rock opera, perhaps only months later, the same pattern reappeared: the blind, deaf, and dumb child who regains sight and hearing through ordeal, returning at last to the waters. My mother had seen the film upon its release, and we obtained the soundtrack at once; she described the story to me orally before I ever watched it myself. The tale of Tommy was the tale of Atum retold - the self-born light descending into the world, losing and regaining awareness, completing the journey of little Horus from innocence to experience. Even at that young age I sensed the unity behind these stories: the same current of transformation moving through each, the same thunderous voice of the Storm God echoing through modern art; the archetype was already doing its work within me.
This is how archetypes survive. They do not depend upon temples or priesthoods; they flow through whatever medium the age provides. The screen has become the latest field of transmission, its photons carrying the same messages once painted in mineral pigments on limestone walls. The gods now speak in the language of cinema, in music, and in the pulse of electronic light. The ritual of watching, listening, and feeling is unchanged - the audience assembled in darkness, the revelation of light, and the return to the world renewed. The earliest decades of film made this lineage clear: biblical epics were among the first cinematic experiences for entire generations, re-enacting ancient myth through the new medium of projected light. Even later coded figures such as Imhotep the mummy continued the tradition of the artist as channel of mythic and initiatory knowledge. George Lucas stands within this same line of transmission. Whether in the epics of Homer, the plays of Shakespeare, or the space myth of Lucas, the pattern endures: information, cipher, and archetype embedded within art and passed across the ages, the eternal story of light and rebirth told anew.
The Star Wars saga is therefore not only the restoration of an ancient myth but a description of the process by which myth itself returns. The archetypes, dormant for millennia beneath layers of theology and politics, reassert themselves through the collective imagination. Whether through a science-fiction epic, a biblical spectacle, or a rock opera, they reach the psyche and remind it of its structure. Each new generation receives them as if for the first time, yet they are as old as the stars they describe.
We have come full circle. The beam of light that once entered the sanctuary of Heliopolis now shines through the lenses of projectors and screens; the same union of darkness and radiance kindles recognition in the minds of billions. The Djed is raised once more, not in stone but in the consciousness of humanity. Medjed - the hidden field, the veiled god - has returned as the medium itself, the pervasive lattice of light through which all things communicate. The cinema, the television, and the glowing window of the computer are his new temples, transmitting the eternal geometry of order and renewal. Medjed’s Force is the Field of the Goddess that endures in external and internal ratio, and life-giving essence.
The archetype of the Sky-Walker, the Storm God, the Light-Bringer, the consort who serves the Goddess of Life, continues to stride across the heavens, now carried on waves of energy rather than sails of papyrus. The story endures because it is the story of life itself: the passage of light through matter, the perpetual rebalancing of field and form. Every generation retells it in their own way.
Appendix X explores these archetypes from the perspective of eternal recursion. The 17 code is shown in many significant texts as an initiatic cypher for revelation.
Return of the Storm God - Appendix X: The Geometry of Eternity
Part 1 Why the Ancients Saw the Universe as a Woven Loop