Wednesday, December 19, 2012

 Papyrus Among The Stars
  
 Hapi, the god of the Nile inundation appears as Aquarius the constellation from which the arrival of the annual flood in ancient Egypt was predicted. 

Hapi was shown as a prosperous, fertile, blue-colored, chubby man with pendulous breasts, a Pharaoh’s fake beard and a belly hanging over his girdle.   His wife, Wadjet gave birth to the first papyrus plants in the Delta so presumably Hapi was the father of papyrus. He also wears a striking crown that looks like a large clump of papyrus growing from his head. Appropriate because the major papyrus swamps came to be synonymous with Lower Egypt, the Delta, and his wife, Wadjet’s name is written using the heraldic plant of Lower Egypt, the hieroglyph of a papyrus plant. 

Amazingly, Hapi’s hairy crown and strange anatomy is transformed into a straw blonde woman or hermaphrodite, who appears on the 17th Tarot card as “The Star,” but he/she is still wielding two water jugs. 

So when you look up and see Aquarius in the night sky you are looking at papyrus writ large, papyrus among the stars.

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