What does the Eye of Horus mean?

In ancient Egyptian mythology, the sun and the moon were regarded as the eyes of the great Falcon god Horus, with the Left Eye of Horus called the lunar eye or eye of Toth often regarded as the symbol of the moon, and the right eye of Horus called the solar eye or eye of Ra, being that of the Sun. The mythology surrounding the eye of Horus revolves around a conflict between the god Horus and Set, another god who is depicted as a man with the head of a jackal-like animal, but is also described as having red hair and the legend of Osiris. Set kills Osiris and scatters his body, then claims the throne of the gods for his own. He is later struck down by Horus, the son of Osiris, who restores order to the world and sets up the pharaohs as the guardians of Ma’at. Set and Horus continue to battle for control of the world, setting up an epic conflict of good versus evil. This beautiful work of art is on the ceiling of Dendera, the Temple of Hathor. Hathor is an ancient Egyptian goddess associated later with Isis and earlier with Sekhmet, but eventually was considered the primeval goddess from whom all others were derived. Hathor’s worship began early in Egypt’s history, possibly in the pre-dynastic era. Let’s count the number of figures in this beautiful depiction: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. So there are fourteen, but why? What does that mean? It has to do with the myth concerning Osiris, who was dismembered into fourteen parts. The Osiris myth is the most elaborate and influential story in ancient Egyptian mythology, and this temple marked the moon’s changes and celebrated the lunar phases. The 28-year life of Osiris was a moon cycle, and the 14 pieces into which his body was dismembered were the 14 days of the decline from the full moon to the new moon. In other words, Osiris was killed at the full moon. The occult significance of this story has to do with his resurrection, and when put together and complete again, his left lunar eye is called Wedjet, which means whole one, and was considered a powerful symbol of healing, well-being, and protection, often depicted with a white pupil, while the right eye represented the morning star Ra, the red sun disk. Horus was called the lord of the sky, which is blue, which speaks to the colors of the three crowns of Egypt and the subsequent symbolism which is still reflected today on the national flags of many countries around the world. He is also sometimes depicted with green skin, which represents fertility, agriculture, rebirth, life, and resurrection. Of course, the symbology of this ancient religion has changed over the millennia. The names have changed, but the significance is the same. For example, the Egyptian Trinity consists of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, but when we look at Mesopotamian mythology, we call them Nimrod, Semiramis, and Tammuz, and in the Babylonian story, Nimrod and Semiramis were the king and queen of Babylon, and Tammuz was their son, but actually a reincarnation of Nimrod. In some versions, Tammuz is killed by a wild boar, and in other versions, he is cut up into pieces and spread over the world, with Semiramis collecting his parts. She finds all the parts apart from his male organ, this prompts her to build an obelisk, which becomes a phallic symbol. We can see this symbol represented in places like Washington, D.C. with the Washington Monument, Cleopatra’s Needle in London, and there’s even an obelisk that was brought to Rome from Egypt by Caligula in 37 A.D. And incidentally, the Christian Trinity also mirrors this myth through the Father God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the Hebrew Bible, the word for spirit is feminine, but this changed when the Bible got translated into Greek. If one looks closely, the Holy Spirit was depicted as a woman 900 years ago here on a chapel ceiling in Bavaria, Germany. That said, the Holy Ghost is often represented as a dove, an ancient symbol which represents the mother goddess for millennia before the Christian era. From the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who frequently appears with doves in ancient Greek pottery, to the Roman goddess Venus, the Babylonian Ishtar, or the Sumerian Inanna, the ancient Phoenicians associated Astarte, the goddess of love and fertility, with the dove. And as I’ve pointed out in prior videos, the Phoenicians, which was a name given to them by the Greeks meaning blood-red, are also linked to the Hyksos pharaohs, as attested to by the fact that the Phoenician deities El, Baal, and Anat are in their pantheon. The same Phoenicians, or Hyksos, a term which means foreign rulers in Egyptian, are also linked to Israelites or Canaanites. Keep in mind that the Phoenician alphabet is basically identical to the old Hebrew script, and it consists of 22 consonant letters only, which come down to 12 symbols, with each of the 12 corresponding to one of the 12 zodiac signs, seven doubles with each of them corresponding to one of the five visible planets and the sun and the moon, and three mothers, which are represented by the three elements and also the trinity. Of course, each letter also represents a number, as the alphabet was used in magic rituals, and again, that’s magic spelled with a k for those that know the difference, and in numerology and other aspects of Kabbalah. It has been said that the Baphomet was regarded as a god by various groups and organizations, such as the Knights Templar. It is most famously portrayed as a goat-headed deity with a human body harboring both male and female attributes, an androgyne representing perfect balance, a union of opposites, and illustrates the old cryptic saying “As Above, So Below.” The word hermaphrodite, incidentally, comes from combining the words Hermes and Aphrodite. This symbolism is further expressed in the 16th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the Ayin, meaning eye. It’s also the 16th letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which gave us the origin of the Greek and Latin letter O, the perfect circle. It is also symbolic of balance, as well as an ancient and universal symbol of unity, wholeness, infinity, and the goddess energy. It represents the female spirit or divine force. The dot in the center of the circle, in some esoteric occult interpretations going back for many millennia, represents the male force. So combined, the circle and the dot symbolize the spiritual merging of male and female polarities. Ayin is for eye, and indeed its ancient pictograph symbol is that of an eye, which can still be broadly seen on what is popularly known as the Hamsa and other places. The word pyramid comes from pyro meaning fire and mid meaning middle. To secret societies and ancient mystery schools, the Ayin represents light. Centuries before Jesus walked the Earth, early Europeans were celebrating light and birth in the darkest days of winter. In the Norse country, this winter celebration was known as Yule. Around December 21st, the winter solstice, fathers and sons would drag home the biggest log they could find and set it on fire. Also dragged inside were evergreens, the one plant that could make it through a Norse winter. Evergreens prove that life persisted in this dark time. There’s a natural attraction to that which lives through the winter when one is struggling to survive through the winter. For as long as the Yule log burned, about 12 days, feasting and revelry reigned supreme. The party raged inside in defiance of winter’s deadly howl. In Germany, the pagan god Odin lent his name to this mid-winter holiday, which would see another Christmas sky-rider, Santa Claus, a thousand miles away. In Rome, winter was less harrowing, but the December festivals were just as elaborate. One week before the winter solstice, Romans began celebrating Saturnalia, a month-long orgy of food and drink named for the god Saturn, which meant plenty. Rome’s established order was turned on its head during this wild, delirious time. The Saturnalia celebrations were certainly times of revelry, of turning the social order upside down, of having the master pretend to be the slave and the slave pretend to be the master, sort of a time out of time. One of the holiday’s important feasts was Juvenalia, which celebrated the children of Rome. Although these early festivals are not necessarily about children particularly, but they are about fertility, children did have their particular place. The indulgence of children, of course, is very much a part of our modern Christmas, but it did have its place even in these ribald, drunken festivals that the Romans had. Many influential Romans worshiped Mithra, the god of the unconquerable sun. To this small but powerful sect, the birthday of Mithra was the holiest day of the year. December 25th was the winter solstice in that part of the world, and it was also understood to be the birthday of the sun god Mithra, and many of those stories, of course, have come into Christian tradition. While Romans were worshiping the sun god, a new religion was taking hold throughout the empire. At first, Christians didn’t celebrate the birth of Christ; his resurrection was the essential fact of the new religion. By the 4th century, however, the question of the holy birth became impossible to ignore. For Christians, the fact of his birth was settled, but the date remained a mystery. The Bible doesn’t mention exactly when Christ was born, but certain facts suggest it probably was not in December. If pagan Rome was already celebrating the birth of Mithra on December 25th, it seemed natural to honor the birth of the Christ child at the same time. By the 4th century, the church made it official, December 25th was declared the feast day of the Nativity. The church knew it could not outlaw the pagan traditions of Christmas, so it set out to adopt them. The evergreens traditionally brought inside were soon decorated with apples, symbolizing the Garden of Eden. These apples would eventually become Christmas ornaments, and holly, a traditional mid-winter decoration, was recast to represent Christ’s crown of thorns. People already had their own agenda for this season, and that agenda was not one that was really radically changed when the names got changed from non-Christian to Christian names. The tension between piety and revelry at Christmas would reach its logical and extreme conclusion in Puritan England, when the holiday would be considered so unchristian it was done away with all together. A dying and rising death, rebirth, or resurrection deity is a religious motif in which a god or goddess dies and is resurrected. A common theme involves fertility rights surrounding the yearly cycle of vegetation, where the deity would die and rise again around spring. Examples include Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Zagreus, Mithras, Dionysus, and Jesus. They were also all born on December 25th, as were Krishna, Zarathustra, Hercules, and of course Horus. These mystery religions use the sun as a symbol of death and resurrection, revering its various cycles, which along with those of the moon, planets, and constellations, were the basis for festivals, sacrifice, and ritualistic carnal activity, which in pagan times were considered nature magic. These ancient annual fertility rights also had esoteric methods of inducing an altered gnostic state, such as those in shamanism or tantric yoga associated with the alleged activation of the third eye, or a subjective psychic connection to deity, which in modern times has to a large degree gone underground. Bringing us back to the occult meaning of Baphomet, there are several theories as to the origin or etymology of the word Baphomet. One of them argues that a substitution cipher was used in the creation of the word, which substitutes the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet for the last, the second for the second last, and so on. Therefore, Baphomet rendered in Hebrew with such a cipher can be interpreted as the Greek word Sophia, meaning wisdom. In this context, the Baphomet carries the same occult meaning as the owl. Let us see what Freemason Aleister Crowley has to say about this, since he was known to sign his name as Baphomet in his book “Magick (Book 4).” Crowley asserted that, and I quote: “The devil is historically the god of any people that one personally dislikes. This serpent Satan is not the enemy of man, but he who made gods of our race, knowing good and evil; he bade ‘know thyself’ and taught initiation. He is the devil of the Book of Thoth, and his emblem is Baphomet, the androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection. He is therefore life and love. But moreover, his letter is Ayin, the eye, so that he is light and his zodiacal image is Capricornus, that leaping goat whose attribute is liberty.” We established earlier that the Ayin is the 16th letter of the old Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets, but in the occult and alternative sciences there is no such thing as any number past nine, so a 16 is actually one plus six, giving the Ayin the numeric or kabbalistic value of seven, which incidentally is the true meaning of the G in Freemasonry, as it is the seventh letter of the English alphabet. The motto of the Pythagorean mystery school is “All is number,” and the number seven alludes to the heavily guarded secrets of sacred internal alchemy, which brings us back to the eye as a symbol for gnosis, the Greek noun for spiritually derived knowledge. In ancient Norse and Germanic mythology, it was said that Odin sacrificed one of his eyes in order to gain wisdom, becoming the wisest of gods and men. It was then said that the god Odin, with his one eye, looks down from heaven upon the Earth. The eye of Odin is an emblem of the sun, which to the alchemist and ancient magician priest class was an esoteric representation of enlightenment. In one myth, Horus also made a sacrifice or gift of his eye to Osiris to help him rule the netherworld. Osiris ate the eye and was restored to life, as a result it became a symbol of life and resurrection to the Egyptians. Horus is referred to as the morning star, the sun at dawn, whose hieroglyph for this means divine knowledge or wisdom. In Revelation 22:16 of the King James Bible, Jesus says, quote: “I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright morning star.” This brings a new context to the famous quote by 33rd degree Freemason Albert Pike, who said, quote: “Lucifer, the light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the spirit of darkness! Lucifer, the son of the morning! Is it he who bears the light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish souls? Doubt it not!” Although modern Christian theology views Lucifer as a personification of evil, the word literally means light-bearer, and in pre-christian mythology, such as what the Prometheus myth represented, a cosmic trickster that bestowed mankind with the fire of the gods or the mysteries of illumination. In the 4th century, there was an early Christian sect which was called the Luciferians, and there was even a pope of Rome that bore that name. The word Lucifer is not in the Hebrew Bible, but was introduced into translations of the Bible and other subsequent doctrines by a bishop named Jerome, who at the time was in a political battle against a Christian bishop named Lucifer. As for the term morning star, it is traditionally attributed to Venus, the planet that shines so brightly that it’s the first to appear in the sky after the sun sets or last to disappear before the sun rises. Jupiter is also sometimes referred to as the morning star and also closely associated to the sun in mythology as it traverses the ecliptic along its 12-year orbit around the sun. The Romans sometimes refer to Apollo or the sun as the eye of Jove or the eye of Jupiter, as the esoteric significance of the eye of the light-bringer speaks to the astrolite it represents, which can not only be tracked externally in the heavens, but can be awakened internally in man.