Day 2 of the Feast of the Victory of Horus: Meditation on Victory

 Day 2 of the Feast of the Victory of Horus: 

Meditation on Victory

This statue of Horus is interesting to me, if a bit sad. He is clad in Roman armor, the garb of Egypt’s colonizers, and the ones who would eventually ban Egypt’s religion. Even a sad look on His face. Yes, He emerged victorious against Set, and ruled the pantheon for centuries. But eventually, the victory was undone, reaching a certain experation date. 

People act like victory is something permanent. You work hard, and you earn your happily ever after. But it can be undone, stripped away at any moment. Lest that sound too pessimistic, defeat can be undone in a similar manner. An Olympic gold medalist can still have their medal stripped from them years down the line if it was found that they somehow cheated. Armenia’s victory against Azerbaijan in the Artsakh war in the 1990s was undone in 2020 when Azerbaijan invaded and successfully ethnically cleansed the region, while no one in the international community lifted a finger to stop it (I’m still not over it). The decision of Roe vs Wade was a victory for women everywhere, and seemed ironclad in US law, but it was overturned the minute the ruling class started to worry they weren’t getting enough human livestock to serve them in wage slavery. Any victory can be undone. You see, it all depends on the way the pendulum swings. Nothing lasts forever. This can be an optimistic or a pessimistic statement, but that is subjective. 

Set gaining the crown may have seemed like a victory for a while, until Horus came along. Was Horus’ victory really permanent though? Horus represented the kingship, first of Lower Egypt, then all of Egypt. What did He do when the foreign powers took over Egypt? The position of Nisut, aka pharaoh, was vacant for centuries even before Rome banned the Kemetic faith. But even this defeat wasn’t permanent. Kemetic Orthodoxy has a Nisut, but is between Nisuts at the moment, although that hopefully won’t be the case for too long. And in your independent practice, you can be your own Nisut.

Just like victory isn’t permanent, neither is defeat. I like to call the time between the banning of the Kemetic faith and the decoding of the Rosetta Stone the “Long Night”. For a long time, the old Gods were forgotten. But when the Medu Netjer, the divine writing of hieroglyphs was decoded, the Netjeru came back, although perhaps They never really left. Horus’ and the Netjeru’s defeat was not permanent, they may not have Egypt but their number of followers is growing. And the victory of monotheism won’t be permant either. When you gain a victory, the work isn’t over. Don’t ever get cocky. You have to work to maintain that victory, or eventually someone might swipe it from you. And if suffering defeat, don’t give up hope because you may be able to turn it into a victory in an unexpected way. Like a game of chase, the game isn’t over until you lose your King. You could be down to just a king and a pawn, but that pawn could still make it across the board and become a queen.

𓋹֍֎𓋹

~ Siamanto the Foreigner

 𓋷𓅁𓈖𓏏𓍯𓀭𓈖𓐎𓏺𓈉𓏏𓅂𓌙𓀀

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