LawPundit Pages

Saturday, May 04, 2019

The Eye of Horus Marked at Abydos in the Stars as the North Celestial Pole

The Eye of Horus is marked in the stars at Abydos to represent the eternal celestial eye at the North Celestial Pole. This decipherment is more or less indisputable, given our previous postings. Abydos shows us the origin of this symbol as a "sky" marker and later hieroglyph, which points correctly to the right and not to the left as erroneously found in Gardiner's hieroglyph sign list.

The Eye of Horus in the Stars Marked at Abydos as the North Celestial Pole
(click on the graphic for a larger image in case your graphic appears too small)

 

Note please that this posting follows the immediately previous postings, which should be consulted for full understanding. For further background, see also my article The Origin of the Cult of Horus in Predynastic Egypt 

The underlying star map above is via the astronomy software Starry Night Pro. We have added the labels and the drawing of the Eye of Horus within the stars.

Our drawing of the Eye of Horus above is based on an image online by Jeff Dahl at the link  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eye_of_Horus_Right.svg, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0), who writes:
"Eye of Horus (right eye). Following the sources, it must be the right eye (the left eye that is the original image has another meaning)."
The Wikipedia writes at Eye of Horus:
"The Eye of Horus was represented as a hieroglyph, designated D10 in Gardiner's sign list. It is represented in the Unicode character block for Egyptian hieroglyphs as U+13080 (ð“‚€)."
The left orientation of Gardiner's D10 is in error.

In fact, the Egyptologists over time have gotten the Eye of Horus backward, facing left, when it should properly be shown facing to the right, as it is actually found in the stars.

It is only later that the original meaning of the hieroglyph to mark the North Celestial Pole became confused with Ra, after its true meaning had been lost.

As written at Ancient Egypt Online:
"According to later traditions, the right eye represented the sun and so is called the “Eye of Ra” while the left represented the moon and was known as the “eye of Horus” (although it was also associated with Thoth)." [emphasis added]
The Eye of Horus mirrors lines shaped by stars around "the eye" in heaven, but those lines were in all probability also intended to represent similar eyelines of the lanner or peregrine falcon. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horus.

In any case, based on our decipherment as published in this posting, it is now possible to understand the initial significance of the Eye of Horus in the stars in predynastic Egypt at the inception of Pharaonic civilization. It marked the North Celestial Pole as the center of heaven.