Dendorah

Temples and Sites
Orlando A.


Yesterday we woke up early and headed up to Dendorah Temple. Dendorah is about one hour north from here near a town called Qena which seems a pleasant town. There is heightened security in the area because of the problems in the area in the mid nineties, however, everything went well on our journey. Our driver said if anyone asks, say you are British. A driver later in the day told me to tell everyone my wife was Egyptian and told Candice to tell everyone, her husband is Egyptian. That was his solution to avoid being hassled, period. I still want to tell everyone I am Nigerian, but I guess that is just a personal problem with me.

Anyway, Dendorah hands down is my favorite temple so far. We got there pretty early so there were only two groups of tourists there. Funny funny story. We head out of our minibus and Candice has packed lunch. A bit of tuna, some bread and crackers. We go through, buy tickets, 20 LE (about $3.70) each thanks to the ISIC card, walk in and through the metal detector, in, no problem. Then I hear Candice beep and see the guard ask her to put the food bag through the detector and later open it up.

I look around and inside this bag they pull out two knives, one which is huge and serrated. I mean this is like an Anthony Perkins psycho knife. I am like OMG. My eyes are open wide. The guard looks up and he looks at Candice and is very nice. He explains she has to take it back to the car. Our driver for the day later tells me, if that had happened to a local, it would have been six months, no questions, in jail. I look at Candice and she is like, "what, one of them was a butter knife. What can you do with a butter knife." Yeah, right.

So anyway, me and Cory look back and after they get through the checkpoint with the rest of the food we make it into the temple area. Dendorah is wonderful. The heiroglyphs are still in pretty good shape and when well lighted you can see many reliefs on the walls. In addition, I had the good fortune of meeting up with a guard who wanted to show me the real deal. He took me down to the basement area and really pulled me to the reliefs that we usually only see in the books.

My jaws dropped when I saw the image of the Black Madonna from about 2000 years before the other one was even imagined. I got the picture but that is dark, it was underground. He also took us: Me, Asari and CJ up to the roof to see the Astrological Zodiac that all are built on now, and a very wonderful relief of Nuit, the goddess representative of the universe. When you go out at night and look in the sky, you see Nuit. (or Night or Nu or Nut). She is also said to be the mother of Osiris (Ausar) and Isis (Auset). Isis (Auset) is in turn the original image of the mother, Madonna or Mary.

But Dendorah is not the temple of Isis, this is the temple of an older goddess, Hathor. Hathor is the wife of Horus, or Heru. So since we know that this god Heru is the basis of every action movie hero, those fantasies you see on TV, all those rambos and supermen and so on, imagine what the real deal's wife was like!

Hathor aligns with Aphrodite or Venus, and is considered a goddess of love and beauty - as well as the golden one. She was later synthesized into Isis, later on, but she is pictured with the headress of cows horns and the sun disc of her father, the sun god Ra.

Generally speaking, Hathor can be considered a goddess who functions as the everywoman goddess: goddess as wife, goddess as mother, goddess as lover. So when a woman is out of sync with these areas in her life she would want to bring herself back into alignment with these functions within herself, since the gods can only exist only through man/woman. One of the things I really liked about Dendorah as well is that it not only highlighted these aspects of Hathor but it also highlighted her relationship to Horus, I mean everywhere you look, you see them together and you see the nature of family that is not always present in other traditions.