Acksblog

Senet Game Board

This board-game was depicted in many pictographs as early as the Predynastic period (3300 BC*). Although some claim that it was originally a ‘fun’ game and only later acquired religious significance, this misconception was the result of decorative symbols that were added on certain squares in later periods.  Senet was based completely upon the astronomical events of Cyclic Catastrophism (CC), which ruled the religious lives of one-hundred generations.

The most obvious aspect of this relationship is the number of squares on the Senet game-board – thirty, the number of years in each cycle of Cyclic Catastrophism, which was common knowledge to every culture in the world for 3,000 years.

The Senet game moves began at the upper left – square-1, moved across the first ten squares, then down to the middle row and back ten squares, crossing to the third row and reversing direction again in a serpentine path.  The number of squares of each move were determined by casting a group of sticks split lengthwise and moving a number of squares equaling the number of sticks facing upward.

Astronomically, square-1  represented the year just after the successful release of priori-Mars, initiated by the brief appearance of Hathor (its solid core), from one of its geostationary orbits.  This square was known as the ‘house of Thoth’, which Plutarch claimed was the same as the Greek Hermes and therefore also of Hathor. This marked the  beginning of a new cycle during which the planet Horus or Ra (Mars still with its solid core)) was absent from the Earth in an orbit around the Sun for 15.6 years, called the teht-Hathor period – named for the deity which appeared at the beginning of the period.  Thus, except for the brief appearance of Hathor, the solid iron core of Mars, associated with the release of Mars, the first fourteen squares of the Senet board were without symbols  – in itself  a corroboration of the CC scenario.  Because this period was less exciting, there was an abbreviated version of the game in which play began on the square-15 and skipped the first fourteen.

Square-15 was known as the square of ‘rebirth’, marking the year of the cycle in which Mars (as Horus or Ra) returned and was again captured in its same geostationary orbit of the Earth, initiating the 14.4 years called the tekhi-Horus period. Game-wise this was considered a ‘lucky’ square and may have earned the player a free throw.  The return (capture) of the planet posed an immediate threat, as all the water in the Mediterranean (messinean Salinity Crisis) was drawn across lower Egypt toward the Himalayas, as if the Earth itself had been tilted.  The pyramids were built as stable life-rafts up which all the populace scrambled until this transient flood was over.  However, the Egyptians favored the next fifteen years due its tidal effect on the irrigation of eastern half of the country (Amarna). Its capture was also spiritually significant because the Egyptians believed (as did other cultures) that each time it (the Duat, firmament, raqia, the sacred risen land at its north pole in Figure 2) had left the vicinity of the Earth it had carried the souls of the recently deceased ‘to the gods’, i.e. to the stars.  As a result, upon its return on Nov.1 of the fifteenth year, was a time when seances were held all over the Earth, in hopes of contacting the souls of their deceased loved-ones.  It was from this notion that ‘All Saints Day’ and its derivative ‘Halloween’ were passed down to ‘modern’ times.

Interestingly, the next square, 16, was considered unlucky and resulted in the loss of  turn. Astronomically, this probably reflected the fact that every approach and capture of Mars in its geostationary orbit involved an element of danger, i.e. the flooding resulting from a misaligned approach of Mars to the Tibetan-Himalayan complex, which had the potential of causing the oceans to overflow massive land areas before the proper alignment was attained.  This may have been the cause of the flood of Noah around 2250 BC.

During each 14.4-year geostationary orbit of Mars life got really interesting. The Earth was brightly illuminated day and night by the reflection of sunlight from priori-Mars, which was >530 times the area of the Moon and much closer to the Earth.  But there were many ‘falls’ of innumerable hot rocks, red dust, water and plant life (manna) to Earth as explained in a previous post, caused by convulsions within Mars due to alignments with the Moon and Sun.  The additional mass of Mars, tidally attached to the lithosphere at Mt. Kailas, slowed its rotation with the asthenosphere acting as a bearing, resulting in each year comprising only 360 days, as reflected in the calendars of all ancient cultures having calendars both of 360 and 365 days per year. Quoting E.C. Krupp (Beyond the Blue Horizon, page 68), “In the papyrus from Oxyrynchus, there is a fragmentary description in Greek, from the second or third century A.D., that describes an Egyptian game with thirty squares. It seems to identify each square with a day in the lunar month but adds that the sum obtained by adding the numbers of squares 15 through 30 together is 360.  This misunderstanding some 800 years after the end of the Vedic period (687 BC) is not surprising, but implies as suggested in this epistle, that the squares represent years and each year in this range had 360 days.  The resulting deconstruction of Mars during each kalpa inevitably led to its release in the thirtieth year of the cycle. Leading up to this, square-26 was called ‘The Mummy Workshop’, discussed below in connection with the Sed Festival.

Square-27 was called the ‘Waters of Chaos’.  Astronomically, this refers to the flooding on Mars leading to its release from its geostationary orbit in the 30th year which could not be fitted into that square.  On the spring equinox of the 30th year of each cycle, the Sun, Moon and proto-Venus, then in an eccentric orbit, all became aligned with Mars causing enormous convulsions within it.  Their indirect tide caused the northern ocean, today known as the  ‘Oceanus Borealis’ on Mars, to overflow the sacred island at its north pole (the Duat). These were called the ‘waters of chaos’.  When this occurred, the water gushed into the largest volcanic vent on priori-Mars at its north pole, which was vacated by the blasting of a sequence of huge rocks  adding to the upward flow of magma for the previous 14.4 years, pouring down into its core where it flashed to steam.  The resulting pressure forced the solid core of the planet out through its side, through the largest fault now known as Valles Marineris on Mars.  The protruding solid core first appeared as the ‘Eye of Horus‘, but continued outward until it exited the planet altogether becoming Hathor whose appearance also became square one in the next game cycle.  This ejection initiated the release of the planet from earth orbit.  The water rushing into the vent formed an enormous whirlpool, the last one of which (687 BC) can still be seen as the northern ice cap of Mars.

Ritualistically, the hot, glowing, solid core, which zoomed very fast and low around the Earth to the East (which in another Egyptian text was pictured as the blood-thirsty Hathor killing men in the desert) was imagined, in the Pepi I funerary text, to be the ‘ship’ on which the deceased pharaoh’s soul flew ‘like a falcon’ ‘to the stars’.  Eight days later, according to Pepi I’s funerary text, the solid core caught up to the outer shell of Mars and re-entered it.  This recombined form of Mars was known as Re-Horakhty, the ‘sun-god which rose into the dawn’.  Thus the final Senet square, 30, symbolized by a circle with a dot in the middle, represented the reformed, complete planet, ensuring the continuation of the astronomical cycle.

The 30-Year Sed Festivals

A clue to the significance of the thirty squares on the Senet board is present in the ancient Sed Festival, celebrated upon the release of priori-Mars in the 30th year of each cycle, the popular name for which was the ‘Feast of the Tail’.  This name corroborates its link to cyclic catastrphism because the ‘tail’ referred to the long, glowing, comet-like, sulfur-gas tail of proto-Venus, which became more and more prominent as the vernal equinox of the 30th year approached.

Although no one understands the significance of the astronomical cycles on the rulers of Egypt, the famous British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans came closest, suggesting that the 30-year Sed Festivals were instituted to replace an earlier ritual of “sacrificing” a pharaoh who was perhaps unable to continue ruling because of age or condition.  These were ritual executions of the reigning pharaoh at the time to enable their funerary celebrations to coincide with the release of priori-Mars from its geostationary orbit.  This view is suggested by the name of square-26 ‘The Mummy Workshop’ in that, as the 30th year spring equinox approached, the pharaoh’s body would have to have been properly mummified prior to the astronomical event.

As explained in a previous post, involving the funerary text of Pepi I [Stairway to Heaven], these spectacular events were considered the means by which the pharaoh’s soul first ascended to the duat and entering Mars through the vent at the north pole made his way through the amenta (underworld) where he boarded the solid iron core, considered his ship (the glowing solid core of Mars) to the stars’.  This idea was made possible by the fact that the astronomical cycle was comparable to the length of a human life.  If a reigning pharaoh was ritually sacrificed just prior to a release of the planet, then a new king’s reign could commence at the beginning of the new astronomical cycle and if lucky he could reign for thirty years until the end of the next cycle.  These events were in the minds of those playing Senet.

An obvious problem was that there was no guarantee that any pharaoh would live long enough to complete a thirty-year reign.  One solution was to crown a relatively young man or even a boy at the beginning of a cycle to increase the chances that he would reign until the next 30-year event. Mummification was another solution to this problem, but another ruler would have to fill-in the rest of the 30-year term, which is known to have happened in many cases, but not currently understood to have been dictated by overwhelming astronomical events effecting the entire Earth.  This may have been the reasoning that permitted queen Hatsupet to assume the pharaoh’s position when her husband died, extending their combined reign to 30 years.

Egyptologists believe that after the Predynastic Period, Sed Festivals just became ‘jubilees’ celebrated after a ruler had held the throne for thirty years and, rather than sacrificing the reigning pharaoh, celebrated subsequent Sed Festivals every three or four years, in order to rejuvenate the pharaoh’s strength and stamina while remaining on the throne.  But Manetho wrote that Pharaoh Teti, who reigned for only twelve years, was murdered by his own bodyguards ‘for unknown reasons’  … and there is a vague mention of Userkare , who may have reigned very briefly before the throne passed to Teti’s son Pepi I.  This is interesting in light of the Pepi funerary text, which makes clear that his funeral coincided with the next release of priori-Mars.

Ancient Egyptian and Vedic texts are invaluable sources of knowledge concerning one-hundred 30-year cycles of Venus, Mars and Mercury, Hathor (Egyptian), Hermes (Greek) and Sarama (Vedic), Mars’ former solid iron core, with the Earth in the last between 3687 and 687 BC.  This is proven by the fact that the 30 square game of Senet was played for 3,000 years!  Because these bodies (gods) dominated the heavens, the ancient world was very much more dangerous and exciting than the modern one.  Ironically, one hundred generations of ancient peoples knew more about the planets than any modern astronomer or astrophysicist.  This ancient knowledge still remains in exquisite detail in the ancient texts, while the ‘great minds’ of today plod arrogantly down the evolutionist, uniformitarian path, digging more holes on Mars that have revealed nothing.

*The corrected 14C date is 3700 BC.

~ by Angiras on April 22, 2012.

Posted in Anthropology, archaeology, catastrophism, Egyptian myth, mythology, paradigm shift, planetary science
Tags: Sed Festival, Senet