Mar 21

Mar 21 How Egyptian Light Persists in Modern Life

Echoes of Ray

When we think of religion of the ancient Egyptians, we might imagine elaborate temples, animal-headed gods, and hieroglyphs—relics of a distant past with little relevance to our lives today. Yet the core concepts that structured Egyptian spiritual life never truly disappeared. They simply found new vessels for expression, continuing to shape our language, symbols, and even family structures in ways we barely recognize.

I discuss this article in a podcast here:

Victoria's Podcast on Egyptian Light

The Persistence of Sacred Sound

The ancient Egyptians understood something profound about the power of sound. The syllable "Ray"—associated with their sun god and divine light—carried sacred meaning that transcended mere labeling. This sound pattern of the name found itself in other words, that conveyed concepts of illumination, authority, and life-giving power.

Listen carefully, and you'll hear this ancient sound pattern echoing through many of our words today relating to power and light:

In Christian tradition: prayer, grace, radiance
In concepts of authority: rule, regal, right
In terms of understanding: reason, rational, reveal

…And there are many more examples.

These are not random coincidences, these are linguistic fossils—preserved sound patterns that continue to carry their original associations with light and divine power. Much like how our DNA carries traces of ancient adaptations (we still have tail bones!), our language preserves echoes of humanity's earliest sacred concepts.

This is all the more striking when we remember Egyptian and early Hebrew languages did not record vowels, which are fluid, and make up the sounds between hard stops of our consonants. Vowels are the first things to change between dialects, while consonants remain preserved. Perhaps these vowels, like the music found in pauses between notes, were considered as holding some of that magic of the gods we were not supposed to speak of out loud. “Thou shall not say God’s name in vain.” Just as we should not say the name Beetlejuice outloud 3x or he comes to life. What’s unrecorded might be as significant as what's preserved. Egyptians saw divine power in “spelling” which is exactly what we call our writing: creating a spell that could be said out loud, and bring something to life. Writing was seen as a form of magic that could preserve thoughts, names, and souls across time. Ancient Egyptians believed if a name could be spelled and read aloud, that person would be immortal. That was a spark to how our entire alphabet came into being- by Jewish workers wanting to learn to make that magic of writing their own- that writing that was written on every surface of the temples that kept their ancestors alive. The emergence of THE original alphabet from Jewish workers adapting Egyptian hieroglyphics is a critical historical transition that many people aren't aware of. This revolutionary shift from picturesque to writing for specific sounds only made literacy more accessible to masses of people, and helped democratize knowledge that had previously been reserved for only the top 5% of the population of Egypt. But I get ahead of myself here…

A Hidden Connection: From Amun to Amen

Perhaps the most striking examples of this continuity appears in our most common religious terms, especially the affirmation: "Amen."

Amun, whose name meant "the hidden one," was the main creator deity in Egyptian religion. As Amun-Ra, he represented both the visible power of the sun and the invisible force behind all creation—divine presence that was simultaneously revealed and concealed. The name Afikomen in modern Jewish traditions preserves an aspect of that sound, as a children’s game that hides a cracker that represents the hidden aspects of god.

When we close prayers with "Amen," we unconsciously preserve both the sound pattern (_M_N without any vowels) and the concept of sacred affirmation connected to the hidden divine. This practice spans across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—three traditions that would officially reject Egyptian polytheism while preserve its deeper wisdom. Few people today even understand that these three major religions are connected, called the Abrahamic faiths that stemmed from Judaism, and make up 60% of the world’s faiths. The first Jewish book is important to all 3, yet Judaism makes up less than 1% of today’s religious landscape.

The Book of Revelation makes this connection to Amun explicit when Christ identifies himself as "the Amen, the faithful and true witness" (Revelation 3:14)—a pronoun, not just an affirmation, literally claiming the title of the ancient Egyptian creator god while embodying the concept of a creator god made visible.

The first time I noticed the connection between 'Amen' and the Egyptian god Amun, and any of these ideas, I felt a flutter of apprehension. Was I crossing some invisible line by questioning something so fundamental to modern religious practice? Yet curiosity pulled me forward..." There would be many more discoveries, all equally earth shattering to the world that raised me.

Modern Family Structures and Ancient Wisdom

Our current struggles with family support systems and maternal well-being have surprising connections to these ancient patterns. In Egyptian theology, the divine family triad— Isis, Horus and Osiris —provided a template for understanding cosmic harmony and balance. Isis, as divine mother, was never expected to nurture in isolation; she was supported by an entire pantheon as the Queen of the Heavens, and the Mother Goddess, often pictured with her son Horus on her nap, whose name is where we get our name for the horizon. And her Egyptian name, Aset, spelled ist, and pronounced as “eest” gives us our word for the direction of the rising sun. The preservation of the “t” in our name preserves her feminine lilt.

Today's mothers often face a profound disconnect from this model of community support. The postpartum depression that affects so many women correlates strongly with perceived levels of support—a reality the ancient Egyptians would have understood intuitively through their theological framework of interconnected divine forces.

Rather than two men and a ghost, as we see in Christianity’s trinity, we saw a balance: a mother, a father, and a divine child born on winter’s solstice, when the sun defeats darkness of winter.

The "chest pressure" that many modern parents describe—that sense of carrying heavy responsibility without adequate support—reflects the imbalance that occurs when we lose touch with ancient wisdom about family and community structures that has been mistranslated and manipulated over two thousand years.

Reclaiming Our Heritage

We don't need to worship Ra, or Rey, however it is spelled, or build temples to the moon to benefit from the wisdom preserved in these ancient patterns. We will see that we do preserve much of this in our holidays and even birthday celebrations. But we can:

Recognize the continuity in our spiritual traditions rather than seeing them as completely separate from what came before.
Honor the importance of support systems for parents, understanding that isolation contradicts our deepest heritage of community care.
Listen for the echoes of ancient wisdom in our language, symbols, and instinctive responses to light, growth, and nurturing.

The patterns established along the Nile thousands of years ago continue to shape our understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. By acknowledging these connections, we don't diminish our current traditions—we enrich them with the depth of human spiritual heritage.

Perhaps most importantly, we can find comfort in knowing that our deepest intuitions about family support, divine light, and the balance of visible and hidden wisdom aren't modern inventions but the continuation of humanity's oldest known spiritual tradition—one that speaks to us still through the whispers of ancient sounds and symbols embedded in our daily lives.