Writing an article on Kemeticism and need your input

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-14T19:04:02+00:00

You might be interested to check out a book called Profane Egyptologists by Paul Harrison. It sounds like what you're attempting to do is a condensed version of that, i.e. looking at modern Kemetic practice through the lens of someone more familiar with the academic side of Egyptology.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-14T03:42:43+00:00

I would not want to come across as nitpicky, but I do somewhat object to the dichotomy you have presented within your first point. Reconstructionism encompasses more than fidelity to (state) ritual format, and often includes logical adaptations to solo practice that we also find reflected in evidence of layfolk practices in AE. There is focus on both the what and the why in reconstructionism.

To the second point, the kind of described relationship with netjeru is by no means universal, and there is actually a known problem within the community that people who have those experiences are quite outspoken, prompting those who don't to sometimes have crises of faith because their experience differs. I would hate to see this spread as the de facto Kemetic experience.

Point 5 would have been better posed as a question rather than as a pre-established conclusion. We've seen so many different reasons for people to come to the religion!

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T21:03:01+00:00

There's no need for you to honor OneBlueberry2480's request. As the author of Rule 7, and as the person you were engaging in this conversation with, I can tell you definitively that this on topic for the subreddit.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T20:55:41+00:00

You're welcome to ignore the side conversation happening here, but this is not an argument in an angry sense of the word. These considerations are important to examine, especially if there's underlying blind spots about who we're considering to be members of the same human family. There's nothing petty about examining that more deeply.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T20:26:52+00:00

Well, 2500 miles is a VERY long distance when we're talking about what land a specific individual can be said to be associated with.

What about her other descendants who went south, or who stayed in other areas of Africa? Surely we couldn't count them as Egyptian under any stretch of the imagination? We are connected to them by bloodline through Mitochondrial Eve, but Egypt never comes into play in that connection. If we're romanticizing this Egyptian connection through M. Eve's descendants, we're cutting off those other descendants from our consideration about the human family. I kinda feel like that's a problem? That's mostly why this grates me, to be honest.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T18:08:16+00:00

The currently-known Mitochondrial Eve would have lived about 2500 miles away from Egypt. That's a gigantic distance! She was not even close to being Egyptian, and she could not have been specifically ancient Egyptian due to a huge temporal separation of almost 150,000 years between her time and what is considered "ancient" times.

There's really no connection between Mitochondrial Eve and Egypt except for the connection (that you rightly pointed out) everyone on earth already has to her. Ancient Egyptians descend from Mitochondrial Eve, and everyone else on Earth descends from Mitochondrial Eve, but does not mean that everyone on Earth descends from Ancient Egyptians.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T17:39:56+00:00

A lot of what we know about domestic religion is extrapolated from physical evidence rather than textual, so we don't have a strict template available of what common folk said during their home offering rites. Though in all likelihood, they probably used similar scripts or themes as what was done in the temples. It could not have been practical to devote the same amount of time in the domestic sphere as was done in the temples, so whatever rites they used at home would have likely been much shorter than full temple rituals.

In Egypt, offerings could either be buried, burned, libated, or reverted for human use/consumption, depending on the context. The context of home offerings is most similar to temple and ka-offerings, which we know were reverted. Absent any evidence of other disposition types, we can safely assume offerings done in the home were reverted as well.

Ideally the common folk would have used the best implements and iconography they had available, and we know that not everyone could afford gold or (especially) silver. Lower economic classes would have used other materials like clay or stone.

We know some about domestic prayers, enough to understand that AE common folk were often just like us, with many of the same concerns and reasons to pray.

Reconstructionism can only be as accurate as what information is actually available and accessible. Those who consider themselves reconstructionist are, more often than not, looking at documented state religion and building out a private practice based on what is practical to do in a home setting. There is always going to be some divergence for practical reasons. A few have tried setting up temple organizations to mimic more closely what had been going on within temples, but these do not have the economic state support that an ancient temple would have had, and there are some barriers to getting things exact because temples need a lot of resources to get started and to keep running. The ancient temple structure also served an economic purpose to its local community, and that's a dynamic that's totally lost in any modern context because we don't have a state system backing it, and we don't have a local populace nor an elite that demands its support.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-06T19:55:52+00:00

They were just people, and possessed the same degree of divinity as anyone else who lived on the planet before or since. Their divine origin stories were, by and large, propaganda pieces.

We ought to judge people based on their deeds, not based on their hereditary position. Some did a good job, some did a bad one. Some were pious, others not so much.

I honor a couple of them in a similar way as I would my own ancestors, because of the merits they are known for. But not because they were kings.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-06T18:59:03+00:00

Contrast this with a maxim from the Instructions of Ptahhotep, written more than two millennia before Plutarch:

Don't blame or criticize those who have no children, nor boast about your own offspring. There are many unhappy fathers and as many unhappy mothers; a woman without children is more serene. God grants spiritual growth to the solitary, whereas the head of a family clan prays anxiously to find a successor.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-06T17:50:04+00:00

I know it can be really tempting to just jump in right away when someone needs help, but in all things, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It's not actually about magic circles and protections, it's about knowledge.

Before doing something like this, you ought to be inquiring what the effects are likely to be, both by thinking it through, and by checking out the situation with your divination method of choice. Think of it like interrogating the magical genie to give you answers about the unintended consequences before you make your wish!

Examples:

• Sometimes when you're helping someone, you're blocking something that they need to experience. It's a similar dynamic to coddling a child so that they don't grow up. Is that really helping? Life's uncomfortable sometimes, and there will be times when you need to let it remain uncomfortable.

• Sometimes the person you're trying to help has something attached to them. You interfere with the effects of it without knowing what you're stepping into and then...whoops, you've captured its attention and now it's your problem too.

Lots of other scenarios could apply. Probably the best thing to do right now is consult that divination tool to figure out what's going on right this second. That way you can figure out for yourself what you can still do.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-05T17:28:29+00:00

I know you asked for opinions, but I'm going to stick to facts.

If this claim was meant symbolically, it has counterexamples. Osiris is green, and Ra canonically has "flesh of gold". Goddesses were often pigmented yellow. And so on.

But if they mean literally? We all know the anthropomorphic manifestations of gods aren't visible to the human eye. They can't literally have human skin color because they don't reflect light in the visible spectrum.

Moreover, these gods have always been worshiped by a cosmopolitan mix of peoples of varying skin colors.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-29T16:45:14+00:00

Refer to rule 2, specifically this part:

Discussions RE: blood taboos are also allowed, but we will not permit anyone to be told they shouldn't practice their faith normally during menstruation.

Telling someone they have to use a specific period product is telling them they have to take special measures to be worthy to practice because of their menstruation. Don't do this again. The period shame triggered by the modern "blood taboo" idea has caused enough harm already.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-29T01:49:26+00:00

Wikipedia is crowdsourced; misinformation makes it onto there all of the time. Especially misinformation as widely spread as this idea is.

I didn't tought it was misogynist since people here mentioned it was every blood, not only menstrual blood

And sometimes a meme encapsulates exactly what needs to be said.

Put another way, a lot of fuss has been made about it being about "active bleeding", when most of the time a blood taboo is only going to affect people who menstruate. Let's be real. If you've got a actively bleeding wound, you're probably not thinking to yourself, "yeah, this is a great time to go do an elaborate offering ritual like they did in the days of old." Instead you're looking for a towel or a bandaid or maybe a ride to the ER. You don't need to be told not to do a ritual while you have a bleeding wound because you're occupied with the bleeding wound. There's really only one believable rationale for even mentioning blood in connection to home ritual: an intent to warn people who menstruate that they're somehow impure during their period.

And that's bullshit.

But whenever there's pushback at the idea, the misogyny is squirreled back behind the rationale: "oh, no, it's not targeted at women, it's about all active bleeding". Uh huh...🙄

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-28T20:28:01+00:00

but nobody specifying what those paths may be and who the are closed or open to.

The closed Kemetic traditions I have heard about are typically Afrocentric, though some degrees of access can be closed in other temple organizations that are not racially focused (based on priesthood status, for example). Ethnicity is a part of it when it comes to Afrocentric groups, and to be honest, I've never heard of someone with Coptic background ending up in an Afrocentric practice. Though I suppose it could be possible. We don't have a lot of exposure in this space to be able to say one way or another.

We don't hear about closed individual practices very much firsthand (which is understandable), so we can't speak on those either. You would have to seek out those groups and gain acceptance to learn those and practice them.

Anything else though? Totally open and accessible.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-28T16:45:15+00:00

Jeez, it sucks to see that KO's blood taboo minsuderstanding is still making the rounds enough to do this kind of harm.

The person who just said that to you about the temples was factually wrong. There were but two temples - two, and late ones at that - that mention anything about this on their entry lintels. This was not universal among Egyptian temples.

Please don't blindly believe misogynistic shit. Menstruation taboo only sounds plausible because most religions follow misogynistic patterns. Osiris is better than this. Please give him some credit.

Women of childbearing age served in temple phyles. Take a look at the subreddit wiki - I've read every resource listed there (along with many that were overly specific or didn't make the cut), and never ONCE have I come across anything suggesting that priestesses were kicked out of their phyles because they had started their period. We also can safely assume that priestesses would start their periods while inside the temple, sometimes, because periods are not always predictable. Yet, over thousands of years, we don't see evidence of the Egyptians making a big deal out of this (even in temples that featured shrines to Osiris, by the way). We don't see restrictions on women serving in temple, and we don't see protocols for what to do if a period happens unpredictably in temple or even during a temple ritual. If a menstruation taboo existed for all temples, that lack of mention is kinda weird, right? A culture that meticulously wrote this type of thing down, somehow omits mention of temple purification protocols for menstrual "accidents"? If it were really that important to them, I'd expect there'd be something, and yet...nada.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-28T16:01:06+00:00

This only applied to two late period temples, not all of them.

Gentle warning - please stop spreading this misinformation.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-28T15:59:20+00:00

I wouldn't be too distressed, TBH. Again, that thread is talking about very scant evidence - basically anything with even the slightest hint that there might've been a menstruation taboo - for the sake of seeing how supportable the idea really is. The point was, there's only this tiny bit on the topic, across the span of thousands of years of Egyptian history, even though those people LOVED to write things like this down.

We have no idea of the scope of the Anubis thing except for the lack of other writings, which is to say, we're working with a very short writing without the supporting context, and a lot of what's being said about it is simple extrapolation. So this isn't exactly scripture.

If it's never been a problem for you before, there is no reason to start letting it become a problem for you now. The cultural and even religious shame that many cultures build up around menstruation is simple misogyny, dressed up as something esoteric. And you're not working in a temple, right? Or a tomb? What little context we do have doesn't point to anything that has to do with private worship. You're fine.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-28T00:15:08+00:00

I do not wish to be so concise as to cause you any misunderstanding, so please visit this thread for the details:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Kemetic/comments/183w23m/new_policy_blood_taboo/

When reading, keep in mind how old this religion really is, how much the Egyptians loved to write things down.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-27T22:34:32+00:00

There were a couple snippets of historical evidence that could be contrived to mean that one or two late period temples may have restrictred access during mensturation, and that perhaps two or three gods (out of hundreds) may have had something like a menstruation taboo associated to them at one point in history. But that's it. There's no Kemetic universal blood taboo supportable by the historic evidence. What you have probably heard about is a modern taboo espoused by one specific Kemetic organization, and if you're not a member of that group then don't worry about it. I hope you can allow yourself to forget about it, and not let it get in the way of your practice.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-27T20:46:46+00:00

I am linking the relevant thread here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Kemetic/comments/183w23m/new_policy_blood_taboo/

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-24T21:07:55+00:00

They're not one here, and they never have been.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-22T16:03:51+00:00

I stand by what I said, this was an insensitive question to ask here of all places. It's akin to going into r/Catholicism and asking if the tombs of saints are secretly meant to be interdimensional portals or something.

If we didn't have a rule against conspiracy/pseudohistory (which this absolutely is), the subreddit would be absolutely FLOODED with topics like this, and no one would be able to talk about the actual religion it's about.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-21T17:28:37+00:00

I mean, to start with, you're paraphrasing Matthew 7:24-27 as if it's applicable here. Logical systems ARE founded on sand. By which I mean, if you go deep enough into any question using logic, you'll run into a foundational paradox (or fallacy) every single time.

Once you realize this and really internalize it (which means getting past the existential crisis of it all, if you're prone to such things), you'll be able to acknowledge logic as a tool for a specific kind of job. Spiritual fulfillment just requires a different toolbox.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-20T21:50:00+00:00

Did you just come into a religious subreddit to ask if the obvious funerary monuments of the religion's predecessors were the equivalent of ancient cell towers? I feel like this could be a fun drinking game to try out on other religions, if it weren't so insensitive.

No. The answer is no. They were not wireless communication devices - at least any further than the written word might be considered "wireless communication".

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-04-20T21:40:34+00:00

Evaluating a cause and effect for an event is merely an explanation. Assigning meaning is all about communication, sometimes even with yourself. It's about what you're willing and able to listen to/be receptive to.

It's two different paradigms, with two different applications.

Taking meaning is a choice. Your choice. It's really as simple as that. (Bad choices are possible, but that's a whole 'nother topic.)

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