Lightning Strikes the Heart
Aug. 22nd, 2017 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alificentListen.
Yesterday, the great serpent Apep, also known as Apophis, attempted to eat the Sun.
My grandfather told me it would happen.
I was a freshman in college when my grandfather died. I was really into Neil Gaiman's Sandman, in which the character Death wears a silver ankh. I came home wearing one. My grandfather was almost ninety then, but if there was anything that man loved, it was a story. He was always giving me books, or recommending books, and they were inevitably good ones. On that day, he pointed to the ankh around my neck, and asked me if I knew what it was.
"Sure," I said, "It's the Egyptian symbol for life."
"NO," he said gleefully, "It's a PENIS."
He proceeded to tell me the REASON that it was the Egyptian symbol for life. He told me that the Egyptian god Osiris was killed by his brother, and his body cut into pieces and scattered, but that Osiris' wife gathered all the pieces, and put them back together to bring Osiris back to life. There was one part she couldn't find. GUESS WHICH PART IT WAS.
He couldn't remember the brother's name. I went back to college, and learned in my mythology class that the brother's name was Set, the god of chaos, and the desert, and foreigners.
A week later, I visited my grandfather in the hospital. He was on a respirator and had a death rattle. It was not good. We were only allowed to go in one at a time. I went in to talk to him, and the last thing I ever told my grandfather was the name of the brother he couldn't remember, in the last story he ever told me.
Set.
He died about six hours later.
Yesterday, even though there was a whole party at my workplace and my coworkers went up on the roof of our building to watch the eclipse there, I went alone across the street and lay down in the parking lot of the closed school there. It was partly cloudy, and I was afraid we would miss it, and I didn't want my coworkers to see me cry and have to explain I was crying about Egyptian mythology.
An asshole cloud moved in about 45 minutes from the eclipse, and there it fucking STAYED. There were two different ones, moving in two different directions at two different heights, and when they met they boiled around each other and started building up a thunderhead RIGHT THERE. Two minutes from totality, they were just straight up taunting me. They had almost moved out, and were JUST covering up the sun. I could see the rays streaming through one side, which would have been beautiful ANY OTHER TIME. I texted my friends that I was disappointed on the level of the villain in the Fifth Element. I watched the birds and other night creatures get confused and come out early. I listened to the cicadas start up like they do at dusk. Everything felt weird. I was emotional.
One minute before totality, the Sun came out. At the literal last minute, it came back out, and I watched through my stupid disposable glasses until the light went out, and then I took them off. It was beautiful. For a minute and a half, there was this weird twilight, and the Sun wore a beautiful rainbow crown, and it was so strangely quiet.
Then the Sun came back.
The Sun came back because one of the gods fought for it. One of the gods fought Apep every day. One of the gods was powerful enough to push the serpent back, and beat it off the Sun, though he often received himself an epic fucking beat down doing it.
You know who that was?
Set.
Thanks, grandfather.
Yesterday, the great serpent Apep, also known as Apophis, attempted to eat the Sun.
My grandfather told me it would happen.
I was a freshman in college when my grandfather died. I was really into Neil Gaiman's Sandman, in which the character Death wears a silver ankh. I came home wearing one. My grandfather was almost ninety then, but if there was anything that man loved, it was a story. He was always giving me books, or recommending books, and they were inevitably good ones. On that day, he pointed to the ankh around my neck, and asked me if I knew what it was.
"Sure," I said, "It's the Egyptian symbol for life."
"NO," he said gleefully, "It's a PENIS."
He proceeded to tell me the REASON that it was the Egyptian symbol for life. He told me that the Egyptian god Osiris was killed by his brother, and his body cut into pieces and scattered, but that Osiris' wife gathered all the pieces, and put them back together to bring Osiris back to life. There was one part she couldn't find. GUESS WHICH PART IT WAS.
He couldn't remember the brother's name. I went back to college, and learned in my mythology class that the brother's name was Set, the god of chaos, and the desert, and foreigners.
A week later, I visited my grandfather in the hospital. He was on a respirator and had a death rattle. It was not good. We were only allowed to go in one at a time. I went in to talk to him, and the last thing I ever told my grandfather was the name of the brother he couldn't remember, in the last story he ever told me.
Set.
He died about six hours later.
Yesterday, even though there was a whole party at my workplace and my coworkers went up on the roof of our building to watch the eclipse there, I went alone across the street and lay down in the parking lot of the closed school there. It was partly cloudy, and I was afraid we would miss it, and I didn't want my coworkers to see me cry and have to explain I was crying about Egyptian mythology.
An asshole cloud moved in about 45 minutes from the eclipse, and there it fucking STAYED. There were two different ones, moving in two different directions at two different heights, and when they met they boiled around each other and started building up a thunderhead RIGHT THERE. Two minutes from totality, they were just straight up taunting me. They had almost moved out, and were JUST covering up the sun. I could see the rays streaming through one side, which would have been beautiful ANY OTHER TIME. I texted my friends that I was disappointed on the level of the villain in the Fifth Element. I watched the birds and other night creatures get confused and come out early. I listened to the cicadas start up like they do at dusk. Everything felt weird. I was emotional.
One minute before totality, the Sun came out. At the literal last minute, it came back out, and I watched through my stupid disposable glasses until the light went out, and then I took them off. It was beautiful. For a minute and a half, there was this weird twilight, and the Sun wore a beautiful rainbow crown, and it was so strangely quiet.
Then the Sun came back.
The Sun came back because one of the gods fought for it. One of the gods fought Apep every day. One of the gods was powerful enough to push the serpent back, and beat it off the Sun, though he often received himself an epic fucking beat down doing it.
You know who that was?
Set.
Thanks, grandfather.
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Date: 2017-08-23 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-27 03:05 pm (UTC)