This is where the drift of the calendar relative to the heliacal rising of Sirius comes in handy.
The ‘Rebirth’ of Sirius
In many ancient cultures the star Sirius was known as ‘the sparkling one’, the ‘scorching one’ or, less flatteringly in Roman times, the ‘dog star’. These odd names are because its heliacal rising occurred in the height of summer when the sun was at its hottest, the ‘dog days’ of the Roman year. The Greeks, however, called this star ‘Sothis’.
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Modern astronomers know it as Alpha Canis Major or by its common name Sirius.
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The American astronomer Robert Burnham Jr describes it as being
. . . the brightest of the fixed stars, ‘the leader of the host of heaven’, and a splendid object throughout the winter months for observers in the northern hemisphere. To Americans the coming of Sirius heralds the approach of the Christmas season and conjures up visions of sparkling frosty nights . . . On New Year’s Eve (it) dominates the southern sky, reaching culmination just at midnight.
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Sirius, however, does not stand alone. It is, in fact, part of a bright constellation we call Canis Major, commonly known as the Great Dog, which trails behind Orion the Hunter. Being the brightest of all the visible stars, Sirius is classed as a first-magnitude star with a value of -1.42. This makes it nine times more brilliant than any other of the first-magnitude stars. It is even said that it can be seen in broad daylight with the aid of a small telescope. Its colour is a brilliant bluish-white, sometimes with pulsating faint flashes of blue. Sirius, quite simply, is the Kohinoor of the starry world. In cosmic terms, being only 8.7 light-years away, it is in our back yard. It is the second nearest star to us after Alpha Centauri.
Today, seen from the latitude of Giza, Sirius rises some 20° south of east. This will hold fairly true for the span of a human life. But eventually Sirius will be seen rising a little further south because of the effect of precession (see Appendix 2). When Imhotep built the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara in
c.
2650 BC, Sirius rose 26° south of east. In 5000 BC it rose 37° south of east. In 8000 BC it rose 58° south of east and at the remote date of 11,500 BC it would have risen almost due south (90° south of east). It is an undisputed fact that the Egyptians observed Sirius avidly, especially when it was rising in the east. It was probably observed more than any other object in the sky, perhaps even more than the sun. Let us see why.
The Heliacal Rising of Sirius
The rising time of stars is delayed by nearly four minutes each day. So if you watch, say, Sirius’s rising in early August it will be at dawn. Watch it rising again in late October and it will be at midnight. Yet watch Sirius rising in early January and it will be at dusk. There is a period from late January to late May during which Sirius has already risen in daylight and now seems to ‘emerge’ out of the sky as it darkens after sunset (i.e., the sky becomes dark enough for the spot of light that is the star to be seen). If you were at the Giza pyramids in early March and were looking due south at dusk, Sirius would emerge out of the sky right over the Great Pyramid.
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There comes a time in the year when Sirius will be seen hovering just over the western horizon after sunset. This happens in late May. In days that follow it will not be seen any more because it is now too close to the glare of the sun’s light for its own light to be seen. It will remain ‘invisible’ for about 70 days, until 5 August. On this day it will rise anew before sunrise in the eastern horizon. This first dawn rising is technically known as the heliacal rising of Sirius, seen by the Egyptians as the rebirth of the star.
Because of the effect of precession, the heliacal rising of Sirius will slowly change in relation to the seasons. Today it happens in August, which is late summer. In 2781 BC it happened on 21 June, the day of the summer solstice.
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This was a concurrence that certainly must have impressed the ancient star-gazers of the Nile. And what made this concurrence even more spectacular was the fact that the Nile’s water also began to rise at this time of year. It was inevitable that this tripartite concurrence - summer solstice, heliacal rising of Sirius, and start of the flood season - would have been regarded as proof that the rebirth of the sun and of Sirius on that same day was the cosmic trigger that unleashed the Nile flood. Not surprisingly, the Egyptians saw those mysterious 70 days that preceded the rebirth of the Nile as a magical transformation in the underworld Duat which took them from death to rebirth. In the Carlsberg Papyrus I (an ancient Egyptian manuscript copied from the cenotaph of Seti I dating from
c.
1150 BC), it is proclaimed that ‘Sirius . . . customarily spends 70 days in the Duat . . . (its) burial takes place like those of men . . . that is to say (in) the likeness of the burial-days which are for men today . . . 70 days which they pass in the embalming-house . . . this is what is done by dying . . .’
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It is not too difficult to see why the ancient astronomer-priests began to speculate that if the same cosmic ‘magic’ that caused the stars to be reborn after 70 days in the underworld Duat could also be applied their dead Horus-king, then he, too, could experience rebirth after 70 days in the ‘embalming house’.
Horus the Son of Osiris
In the creation myth of Heliopolis we are given the genealogy of the pantheon - also known as the Great Ennead or Great Council of Nine - which was made up of four generations of gods. At the head is Ra-Atum, who became manifest in the sun. Then by masturbation or spitting, Ra-Atum created Shu and Tefnet, the air-god and the moisture-goddess. From them came Geb, the earth-god, and Nut, the sky-goddess. Geb and Nut were united and from them were born four children: Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephtys. Then Geb and Nut were pulled apart by the air-god, Shu (this is probably where the idea came from that the image of the sky had been imprinted on the land and made Egypt ‘the image of Heaven’).
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The myth now enters its second phase, sometimes known as the Osirian myth. It reveals how Osiris and Isis became lovers and ruled Egypt as the first pharaoh and queen. It then goes on to tell how Seth, their jealous brother, plotted the murder of Osiris. One version has Seth drowning Osiris in the Nile, while another has him cutting Osiris’s body into 14 parts, which he then scatters all over Egypt. Seth takes the throne while Isis, almost mad with grief, searches frantically for Osiris, finds him and, with her magical powers, brings him back to life long enough to take his seed and become pregnant. She then hides in the bulrushes of the Delta and gives birth to a son, Horus. When Horus grows up, he challenges Seth to a duel. A great battle ensues. The Great Council of Nine, represented by Geb, interferes and divides Egypt between the two contenders. But the decision is reversed by Geb, who decides that Horus, ‘the son of Osiris’, will rule the whole of Egypt and that Seth will be banished into the desert. As for Osiris himself, we are told that he ascended to the stellar world and established a kingdom for the dead called the Duat.
Egyptologists have long known that in ancient Egyptian cosmology Osiris was identified with the constellation of Orion.
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They have all agreed, too, that his wife-sister Isis was identified with the star Sirius called
spdt
or
sopdet
by the ancient Egyptians. Thus in
The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt
, for example, we are given this characteristic definition: ‘Along with her husband SAH (Orion) and her son SOPED,
Sopdet
was part of a triad that paralleled the family of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. She was therefore described in the Pyramid Texts as having united with Osiris to give birth to the Morning Star.’
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According to the archaeoastronomer Edwin C. Krupp:
In ancient Egypt this annual reappearance of Sirius fell close to the summer solstice and coincided with the time of the Nile’s inundation. Isis, as Sirius, was the ‘mistress of the year’s beginning’, for the Egyptian New Year was set by this event. New Year’s ceremony texts at Dendera say Isis coaxed out the Nile and caused it to swell. The metaphor is astronomical, hydraulic and sexual, and it parallels the function of Isis in the myth. Sirius revives the Nile just as Isis revives Osiris. Her time of hiding from Set is when Sirius is gone from the night sky. She gives birth to her son Horus, as Sirius gives birth to the New Year, and in texts Horus and the new year are equated. She is the vehicle for renewal of life and order. Shining for a moment, one morning in summer, she stimulates the Nile and starts the year.
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A word of caution: many Egyptologists tend to use the Greek name Sothis to denote the star Sirius. For example, a typical passage from the Pyramid Texts translated by British philologist R.O. Faulkner reads: ‘O Osiris the king, arise, lift yourself up . . . Your sister Isis comes to you rejoicing for love of you. You have placed her on your phallus and your seed issues into her, she being ready as Sothis, and
Horus-Spd
has come forth from you as “Horus who is in Sothis”’
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. Although Faulkner did admit that ‘Horus-Spd’ was also a star, he failed to give an adequate explanation of why this unidentified star was said to ‘come forth’ from the star Sothis, i.e. Sirius. Such a statement simply makes no sense.
In 1994 a young French Egyptologist called Natalie Beaux decided to challenge Faulkner’s translation. Working closely with the American Egyptologist Virginia L. Davis of Yale University, an accredited authority on ancient Egyptian astronomy, she noted that in the Pyramid Texts there were not one but
two
names that seemed to refer to the star Sirius: one was
spd
, and the other had the addition of the suffix ‘t’ to give the feminine variant
spd-t
. But how could this be? The explanation to this mystery is given by Natalie Beaux:
It is evident that there originally existed a masculine form,
Spd
, and also a feminine form,
Spd-t
, and it would be logical that they refer to two different stellar entities. Dr V.L. Davis has proposed that the second form (i.e. Spd-t) is the name of the constellation to which belongs Sirius, in view that most constellations carry feminine names. This proposal has the advantage to make comprehensible texts which, without this distinction, do not make sense as in line 458a (Unas) ‘
Spd is alive, because Unas is alive, the son of Spd-t
’, where it is clearly demonstrated that the filial relationship Spd/Spd-t represents the belonging of the star to the constellation.
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Beaux then requotes the same passage from the Pyramid Texts used by Faulkner, with her new interpretation for
spd-t
and
spd
: ‘O Osiris (as Orion) the king, arise, lift yourself up . . . Your sister (wife) Isis comes to you rejoicing for love of you. You have placed her on your phallus and your seed issues into her, she being ready as Spd-t (Canis Major), and Horus-
Spd
(Sirius) has come forth from you as “Horus who is in Spd-t” (Sirius which is in Canis Major).’
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The passage now clearly makes sense. It also provides us with the correct metaphor to describe an actual astronomical observation. For when the ancient priests described Horus-
spd
as being ‘in
Spd-t
’, what they really meant was that the star Sirius was in Canis Major, or, in their mythic parlance, Horus was in the womb of Isis. This clever interpretation by Beaux and Davis also provides us with the correct correlation between the astral triad Orion, Canis Major and Sirius and the mythic triad Osiris, Isis and Horus.
By testing Beaux’s interpretation of
spd
in
spd-t
on other passages from the Pyramid Texts, it is clear that it is correct. For example:
Orion is enveloped by the dawn-light, while the ‘Living One’ washes himself in the Horizon. Canis Major (Spd-t) is enveloped by the dawn-light, while the ‘Living One’ washes himself in the Horizon. This king Unas is enveloped by the dawn-light, while the ‘Living One’ washes himself in the Horizon.
Let the sky brighten, let Sirius (Spd) live, for this king Unas is the ‘Living One’, the son of Canis Major (Spd-t).
The ‘Living One’ is obviously the Horus-king (Unas in this case) who is reborn as the star Sirius, i.e.
spd
, which is within Canis Major, i.e.
spd-t
.
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The original hieroglyphs read:
nh spd n wnjs js nh s3 spd.t
(
spd
is alive because Unas is the Living One, the son of
spd-t
).
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Now had Natalie Beaux also been investigating the orientation of Djoser’s
serdab
, as I had been doing, she would surely have noticed that at the precise moment of the rebirth of
spd
, i.e. the rising of Sirius in the east, if one turned north one would see the star Al Kaid in the bull’s thigh (the Plough) positioned at about 4° 35′ to the east of north and some 16° above the horizon - the very same spot in the northern sky which was in alignment with the
ka
statue in the
serdab
, the latter being part of the Step Pyramid bearing the name ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’. And although looking at this spot in the sky in isolation does not appear at first to have any particular significance, it becomes a sort of ‘trigger’ when occupied by the star Al Kaid, the ‘hoof’ of the celestial bull, to induce, as it were, the rebirth of Sirius, the star of Horus.