I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks. -Eugene V. Debs
If you spend enough time around gods, you gain a lot of really useful wisdom and knowledge, but it comes at a price. One of the fairly often ignored prices is that you also gain a real annoying familiarity with what your patrons look like when they know something you don’t. Heru has a pretty good poker face, but his eyes always give him away; he looks like the canary that got the cat when he tells me, “If you really believe that the concept of noble bloodlines and distinctions of class in religion is so very terrible, there’s nothing keeping you from becoming my priest, is there?” Sometimes I just have to take the L, I guess.
I always assumed the priesthood was safely out of my wheelhouse, in the realm of those nobler, more pious, and better-educated in Egyptian esoterica than I. The kind of person who would do that was almost the exact opposite of the person I wanted to be. Of course, the same could be said about marriage; these things could technically happen to me, but why worry about it, any more than sitting around worrying about getting cancer? As far as I was concerned, a priest was someone who sacrifices their mundane life so that they can give offerings and do rituals in front of statues. It is a good thing to do, I thought, but it only really had an effect on their world, not ours, and was more the sort of thing you did to hedge your bets for a better afterlife than just for sheer love of the game. It was a community service to a community I would never truly belong to: that of the gods. I read that priests were one of the few literate members of ancient Egyptian society, and that it was a rather prestigious position at the time, and that too reinforced my confirmation bias that the priesthood was something I could learn about academically, but not a real possibility I needed to concern myself with.
There was also a certain freedom that came with this perspective: despite their reputation among their contemporaries for being a particularly magical and pious people, we don’t know how regular Egyptians practiced, so I could pretty much worship the gods and experiment with magic however I pleased without worrying about if I was “doing it right”. Sure, priests in Egypt didn’t do anything like what I’m doing, but who cares? I’m no priest; I’m just a layperson. So when Set started dropping very unsubtle hints that he did want me as his priest, I told myself, they have tons of other followers who are way more qualified. They might be making a big deal about it to me, but they probably are doing the same to everyone, and wouldn’t ultimately care that much if I, personally, was a priest. Why would a pantheon that hates rebels and criminals so much, be genuinely invested in the service of someone like me? It was a comforting line of reasoning, but as it turns out….well, the same as with getting engaged a full decade before I thought I ever would: life comes at you fast, and the gods do not care even a little if I (or other people!) think that I can, or should, be a priest. They’ve been grooming me for this since I was 14, and they are not all too concerned about my insecurities, imposter syndrome, or desire for the acceptance and acknowledgement of my peers.
I’m in favor of the idea that priesthood is not a status one obtains that makes you an elite class of kemetic practitioner, or a title that gives you any spiritual authority over anyone else in general (although I’m fairly sure that most people who’ve researched how the ancient priesthood functioned already knows Kemetic priests are nothing like Christian priests who lead their congregation through weekly sermons), but a state of being that is achieved when one commits to serving ma’at through traditional ritual actions. The only reason I think it should be defined this way is that the gods keep insisting that I do these things to the point that it’s no longer worth the effort it takes to avoid them, and then calling me their priest in the most self-satisfied way possible, even though I haven’t done anything to earn the distinction of “priesthood” other than let them boss me around for a little under a decade. I would be perfectly happy to do these rituals and make these offerings without wearing the stupid priest hat, but unfortunately for me, that’s not how it works. Or, as Set put it, “The priest hat is non-negotiable. Either you’re doing this, or you’re not.” (If you’re not already imagining me smacking a silly looking ceremonial hat off of my head over and over while Set keeps putting it back on and getting progressively more frustrated each time, treat yourself to a laugh at our expense.) He also always gave me the impression it’s more about quantity than quality, and the NTRW are sort of in a “beggars can’t be choosers” situation, so I don’t doubt that if they already had a functioning priesthood, I would’ve just remained laity. But, they don’t, and here I am.
I feel called to do this because I feel grateful to the gods, both for the blessings they’ve given me and for the helpful traits they’ve put the work into cultivating in me, dating back to when I was a young teenager. When I think about why I would go through the trouble to read all these Egyptology books, making rites and a ritual calendar I may actually follow long-term, dealing with this religious community that I doubt I’ll ever really feel I belong to, the answer I come up with is not “piety” or “respect” or “reverence”, but gratitude. Christians always told us to “have the heart of a servant”. I didn’t like the idea as a kid, but now looking back, I can see that it’s really because the Christians wanted us to have the hearts of slaves. I had to serve God because otherwise I would be evil, and burn for eternity. That’s not the case here; sure, if I keep refusing to do it they’ll keep bugging me about it, but ultimately I am not being forced to wear the priest hat at gunpoint. In the end, I realized I wanted to do this because I want to give something back to gods that have helped me so much. Once I figured that out, the only thing left to grapple with is how my human community will react.
Other people talk about being a priest as though it’s something they covet, a distinction that would make them feel better about themselves and their practice. Thinking of myself as a priest just makes me feel silly. Not to mention, all of my hangups about if I “deserve” to be a priest, if I even qualify. At the end of the day, though, the truth is that I don’t really think that I do qualify; I just think it doesn’t really matter. The reason Heru’s smug little comment made me so mad is that I can’t really argue with something I believe to be true: it is the sovereign right, and duty, and honor of all thinking beings to do what they believe is right, regardless of these rules we come up with about who’s “allowed” to do this or that. As soon as I began to understand rituals and other acts of service toward the gods as doing my own small part to maintain the harmonious functioning of the universe, I started to believe that acting as a priest when my gods ask me to is the right thing to do. If you disagree, well, go ahead and talk your shit, but you can’t actually do anything to stop me.
At this point, online piety scolds have done more to directly prevent me from authentically connecting with and gaining a genuine respect and reverence for the NTRW than any other force I’m aware of in the universe, and that is fucking saying something, considering I used to have panic attacks every time I remembered that the very second I believed I was actually talking to an ancient Egyptian god, I would become an apostate, burn in hell, and never see my ancestors or family ever again when I died. When it comes to the priesthood, people don’t seem a fraction as concerned about the real practical obstacles in our path when it comes to doing the actual work, as they are about the perceived status of priests in relation to laity. I’ve yet to see anyone, kemetic or not, talk about why someone should or shouldn’t be a priest without bringing up whether they have the “right” to, whether it’s “their place”. Considering that I was told being a priest was pretty much an unpaid customer service job that sometimes gives you the warm fuzzies, that the purpose of it was to assist the gods in their holy and vital functions in order to serve Ma’at, it makes me feel like our community is petty and shortsighted, just a bunch of crabs in a bucket. I would even go so far as to say I find it kind of disrespectful to our faith and gods, since we’re making what should be an act of service to the gods into an act of service to our egos; and frankly, it achieves absolutely fuckall for anyone, unless your goal is to make sure that less people attempt the kind of rites and offerings that history shows us our gods want, and may even need, fairly badly.
From non-kemetics who insist kemeticism is closed when it isn’t and that practicing it if you’re not Egyptian makes you a racist colonizer, to other kemetics who’ve built an identity around showing off how much more pious or better-educated they are than other kemetics, it seems that a lot of people’s real goal is to prevent anyone from even trying to volunteer their time as a priest. In ancient times, priests were paid, had full staffs to help them, had vacations, had state sponsorship, official education, and societal respect for their position. Now, not so much; the world has changed, the empire of Kemet has fallen, and most of the people who are willing to do the work required of a priest are just not realistically able to do exactly what priests in Ancient Egypt did. If we want a chance at a a real, revived kemetic tradition, we must let our traditions -and our gods- evolve. I still try to follow as many of the traditional elements of rites as possible, but I think it’s been kind of an open secret for a while that the gods don’t actually require every single one of these rules from antiquity to be followed every single time someone does a ritual for them. It’s just not realistic, and in order to continue to get a good chunk of people actually present and prepared to do the work, I think it’s a necessary compromise for the NTRW as living things to change and adjust their survival mechanisms based on the new and changing circumstances of their environment.
Why would the gods lack this one simple ability, the most basic of all forms of life, to use the cycle of life and death to their species’ advantage? Ours is not a pantheon that shies away from death, destruction, or danger. The gods are portrayed as half-human and half-animal, to remind us that they are both of us, and of the primal forces of the natural world. They reveal themselves to us in their myths as capable of the full range of human emotions and experiences: glory, compassion, conceit, victory, defeat, birth, death, happy families and unhappy families, glory and disgrace, virtue and vices alike; my walk with them has brought me through some of the toughest days of my life and into some of the best, filling me with awe and disappointment, pride and shame, joy and grief, fury and peace, agony and comfort, reverence and defiance. They are icons of the primal forces of nature, the ugly human id and the divine human potential -not static, sterile statues completely unchanged, or unchangeable, by time or circumstance. Rather than continuing to drag each other down into the unorganized bucket where we’re all too anxious and performatively humble to do anything useful, those who feel called to this should do their research, talk it out with their gods as best they can, and do the version of the priesthood that is actually accessible to them. If you suspect the gods are genuinely offended by somebody’s worship and offerings, let the gods handle it themselves! Our job is to support and be excellent to one another in our communities, not turn everything into some stupid pissing contest.
Maybe I am wrong about all this; but I am no longer afraid of being wrong. I believe in my gods. I believe in evolution.
Ethical Chaos 