Sacredness, Numbers and Sacred Places

In the rich religious landscape of ancient Egypt, sacred space was intrinsic to their worldview. Their entire civilisation revolved around the presence of divine forces in the temple and the tomb.

The Temple of Seti I, Abydos

According to modern Egyptologists, sacred spaces are fundamental elements of religious life, providing a focal point where the sacred meets the profane world of everyday existence. But, as the renowned historian of religion Mircea Eliade famously pointed out, sacred space is not homogenous; it is set apart, imbued with a deeper, more significant meaning that demands a unique response from the believer. These spaces invite rituals, symbolisms, and actions that express respect and devotion, such as covering or uncovering one's head or performing purification rituals.

In the rich religious landscape of ancient Egypt, the notion of sacred space was intrinsic to the people's worldview. Their entire civilisation revolved around the belief in the presence of divine forces manifest in specific locations—primarily the temple and the tomb.

In this article, I will examine the relationship between space, sacredness, and number. In this case, a number is understood as a metaphysical entity. Plato claimed that numbers exist in some mind-independent abstract heaven. We can't see, hear, taste or feel numbers. But if there are no numbers, what is mathematics all about? I contend that numbers were more than mere quantifiers for the ancient Egyptians and were believed to be connectors or bridges between the divine and the human domain.

The Concept of Sacredness

Sacredness, at its core, signifies a separation from the ordinary, marking something as distinct and revered, most often in the past, because something sacred was connected with metaphysical, supernatural entities called gods. In religious traditions across cultures, this sense of sanctity creates a boundary between what is holy and what belongs to the everyday world. Mircea Eliade, a renowned historian of religion, argued that sacred space is set apart from the profane, everyday environment and that this distinction requires a unique response from believers, whether through specific rituals, acts of reverence, or symbolic gestures. For example, in Christian traditions, women were instructed to cover their heads in church, a practice that persists in certain denominations today, while men removed their hats as a sign of respect when they entered the house of God. Similarly, purification before entering sacred spaces is a ritual in many religious traditions. In Islam, believers perform ablutions before entering a mosque, a cleansing rite that prepares them to enter a space devoted to divine worship.

Of course, today, we can make anything sacred simply by treating it differently from every other thing. Some people manage to make their weekends sacred - they eschew all work, lay in bed til 10 am, then start to perform their weekend rituals - a run, a coffee in a bar, dinner with friends, etc., but it’s not the same as the sacredness connected with the metaphysical and supernatural because although your weekend may be pleasant and life-affirming it lacks scale when compared to the reverence an entity that created the cosmos should command.

Temples: Connection to the Cosmos

In ancient Egypt, temples were seen as connecting the people and their creation myths. These sacred buildings were constructed on land considered to be primordial, a symbol of the world's origin when the mound first rose out of the primal waters of Nun. This elevation of the temple ground symbolised the first act of creation, as life emerged from chaos and order was established. Ancient Egyptians viewed the temples as more than buildings—they were sacred centres that transcended time and space, representing eternity and the connection between humanity and the divine.

All temples in Egypt were models of the cosmos and were the most sacred spaces for the living. The ancient Egyptian universe comprised heaven, earth, and netherworld, all part of creation and surrounded by the eternal darkness of the water of Nun. Though separate areas, they were believed to be permeable to the gods and the dead because they were metaphysical beings who could transcend the rules of the physical world in the same way as numbers. The ancient Egyptians had no word for cosmos, that’s a Greek notion, they spoke of the three-dimensional space as three distinct layers, the sky as the goddess Nut above, the water below in the form of god Nun or Naunet, and the fertile earth in the form of the god Geb the middle. According to architect Martin Chytuin, they symbolised these three elements as a cube.

Many archaeologists prefer to think of the temple as a representation of the land of Egypt itself and, more particularly, the primaeval mound at the beginning of the world and as a house for the gods. Some see temples like European manors, with courtyards, living spaces, libraries, and storage facilities all supplied by vast agricultural estates, similar to the great religious houses of medieval Europe.

The forest of columns with their lotus flower capitals and friezes of verdant vegetation represented the natural world and the marshy land at the beginning of time when the world was fresh and perfect. As their visitors moved from the sun-filled outer courts into the hypostyle halls, the light diminished until they were in the semi-darkness of the rooms surrounding the holy of holies, the sacred sanctuary that only the priests and the king could enter because it was the home of the gods. The floor level gradually rose, lowering the ceilings, making the space smaller, darker, and more mysterious, imitating the dark mystery of creation.

As a sacred space, the temple connected the Earth to the heavens. The gods could come and go at will, but they could only inhabit the space specially made sacred to them on Earth. The temple’s foundations were dug into the earth until they met the water table, interpreted as the holy eternal waters of the primaeval Nun. The Nun was the everlasting, infinite well of creation and healing that existed before the world began and to which everything that ever was would return at the end of time. The Nun was the same water that made up the sky's deep blue and was the home of the gods. The pylons and obelisks of the temple were designed to pierce the deep azure of the sky and connect the temple to the primal waters in the sky, making the temple like the cosmos - a bubble of air and space surrounded by water.

Eliade says that sacred space is different from profane space because for something to be unique, it must exist in contrast to what is ordinary or profane. These conceptual opposites can be seen in the physical changes in how the space is organised. For instance, the temple space is organised completely differently from that of a house or palace. The materials used are different, too. Temples in Egypt were made of stone, and domestic dwellings and palaces tended to be made of mud brick.

The rituals involved liminal spatial behaviour; participants crossed a threshold separating the sacred from the mundane when they entered the sacred space. We can see the importance of these liminal zones in the attention paid to the architecture of the temple entrance with its pylons and obelisks and to the inscription and images placed over doorways and door jams. The relative sizes or dimensions of the rooms can also be important, but Egyptologists are generally not interested in the dimensions and measurements of sacred buildings. Neither do they look at the spatial distribution of the sacred buildings.

Archaeologists are not against numbers per se; they love numbers, but only the scientific kind. Whether their measurements are accurate or inaccurate, they are always in modern scientific units. To understand the sacred numbers locked into the dimensions of holy spaces, it is necessary to use the measuring system used by the people who built them. It is also essential to question whether the dimensions currently being recorded were those deemed important in the past; for instance, Plutarch suggests that the Egyptians, like the Pythagoreans, were interested in not only squares and rectangles but in perimeters and who measures perimeters these days?

However, many scholars of the history and architecture of the Ancient Near East seem to think that many of the societies they study used sacred numbers in their religious buildings and that they learned how to do it from the Egyptians. [1]  This view, however, cuts no ice with Egyptologists who stick steadfastly to their ‘scientific’ thinking and ‘scientific’ methods. There is, however, an exception to this otherwise general disinterest in sacred numbers. Egyptologist Guyla Priskin pointed out that instructions for creating ideal or mythical temples appear inscribed at the temples of Dendera and Edfu. Scholarly opinion, he says is however is highly sceptical as to their decipherability.[2] We will hear more from Priskin in later posts.

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[1]   Chyutin .M. Architecture and Utopia in the Temple Era, , t&t clark, 2006.

[2] Gyula Priskin, On the Number Delimiting the Sacred Space of the Dendera Temple, Discussions in Egyptology 55 (2003), pp. 29–35.

Temples: Connections to immortality

The Great Temple of Seti I at Abydos is a monument to Seti and his son Ramesses' belief in immortality. The temple is entered through the ruined first pylon, which would have fronted a quay connecting the temple with the River Nile to the east. A courtyard with walls showing battle scenes of Rameses II's victories and two ablution tanks used for the ritual purification by priests can still be seen. The second pylon, hardly bigger than the first, was fronted by a portico with niches once containing Osiris-form statues of Rameses II.

Seti I

The second courtyard, also decorated by Rameses II, has a doorway in its southwest corner, which gave access to a complex of administration buildings and storehouses, including an audience hall with a dais for the king's throne. The entrance to the outer hypostyle hall is through a central doorway from a portico with square columns decorated with scenes of Rameses II offering to various deities. In the time of Seti I, there were seven doorways through the façade, each having a processional way from the court to seven chapels. Later, Rameses filled these doorways, leaving only the central main entrance and a smaller doorway at the north end. This hall boasts 24 papyrus columns, each showing Rameses in the presence of the shrine god at the end of the aisle.

My new research on ancient Egyptian sacred numbers leads me to view that the seven doors and the seven chapels represented the regenerative power of the goddess Isis, the seventh god of the pantheon of Heliopolis. Isis was the mythical wife of Osiris who took the 14 parts (2x7) of his dismembered body, put them together and revived her dead husband. On a raised platform to the west, the chapels from left to right are dedicated to the deified Seti I, Ptah, Re-Horakhty, Amun-Re, Osiris, Isis and Horus. The chapel dedicated to Seti I shows the gods endorse the king. The ceilings are vaulted, and the six god's chapels all have a false door carved on the western wall. The Osiris chapel, however, has instead a doorway which leads to a suite of rooms behind, which may have been thought of as some form of unique accommodation for the god of resurrection and king of the Duat.

The seven doorways lead into the second hypostyle hall, decorated with 36 pillars during Seti I's reign. The shrines were completed before Seti I's death and decorated with scenes of the king offering to the gods and receiving the symbols of life and dominion and royal insignia in return. These scenes would have been complemented by the rituals performed by the priests to transform the king into the god Osiris.

The Osiris chapel leads into a transverse area devoted to the cult of Osiris, including two halls and two sets of chapels. The three small chapels to the right of the first hall are dedicated to the gods Osiris, his consort, Isis, and their son, Horus. In ancient Egyptian religion, the living king represented Horus on earth, and when he died, he became Osiris, ruler of the netherworld. Beyond these three chapels is a secret chamber with two pillars that could only be accessed by the highest priests, for it was where the mysteries of Osiris were enacted.

The temple's southern extension contains more chapels, the "Hall of the Barques" (where the barques used to carry the statues of the gods during ceremonies were kept), and the unfinished "Hall of the Butchers," or the temple slaughterhouse, where the bull-killing rituals took place. The so-called "Gallery of the Ancestors" contains the famous Abydos King List.

In the architecture and layout of the chapels, the second hypostyle hall and the Osirian, we can see the use of the number six or multiples of six – 36 pillars and six vaulted chapels. My new research leads me to the conclusion that the use of the number is designed to make a solid magical connection with Osiris, the sixth god of the pantheon of Heliopolis, the god all kings of Egypt claimed to be descended from and the god they all claimed to be when deceased.

In the Osirian world, we can find further evidence of number magic. At the centre of the Osireion is a rectangular island with ten Aswan rose-coloured granite pillars, each four cubits square and eight cubits high. The ten pillars most likely represent the king as Horus, the tenth god of Heliopolis. The dimensions of the pillars are related to numbers associated with the primordial waters - four and eight. The primordial waters are the healing waters the deceased must pass as part of the journey to the afterlife. Two unequal receptacles are carved into the centre of the floor, perhaps reflecting the two pillars in the secret chamber and the separation of rebirth. About seven cubits of stairways lead down into the water channel at either end of the island. The channel surrounding the island is about four cubits across and seven cubits deep. The four cubits are associated with primordial waters, and the seven cubits with Isis, compounding their magical and regenerative potency. The outside walls of the structure, made of red sandstone, are some twelve cubits thick and contain six cells on each of the room's long sides, with three more on the wall facing King Seti I's temple and another three more on the opposite wall. The number twelve was associated with the hours of the night and the journey through the underworld. Red was associated with the sun, adding further credence to the idea that the Osirian was part of the deceased Seti's transformation into the sun god Re.

The Sacred Nile and Natural Elements

Beyond temples and tombs, ancient Egypt's geography was sacred in itself, particularly the Nile River, which played a vital role in shaping the Egyptian religious consciousness. The Nile was regarded as a life-giving force essential to the survival and flourishing of Egyptian civilisation. Its annual floods were seen as gifts from the gods, providing fertile soil for agriculture and symbolising renewal and resurrection.

However, unlike other cultures worshipping specific river gods, Egyptians associated the Nile with a collection of deities responsible for different aspects of the river's life-giving properties. For example, Khumn, Neith, Sobek, and Osiris were linked to the Nile's fertility, while Hapi represented the river's inundation. Neith, one of the oldest ancient Egyptian goddesses, was known as the flood, and as a creatrix, Sobek was associated with the king and royal power, as was Hathor, who was often depicted as a female crocodile. These gods were revered for their roles in the river's cycles and their connection to the broader concept of life, death, and rebirth.

Nomes and Local Sacredness

Egypt's unique division into nomes, or provinces, each with its associated deity, highlights ancient Egypt's localised nature of sacredness. Each of the 42 nomes had its specific god or group of gods, emphasising the role of regional religious practices and the sacred spaces dedicated to these local deities. In this sense, sacredness was not monolithic but could be experienced in various ways depending on where one lived.

The island of Elephantine, for instance, was a significant religious centre located at Egypt's southern border. Known for its association with the god Khnum, who was believed to control the Nile's floods, Elephantine was a sacred site where natural and divine forces met. This blending of geography, religion, and sacred space underlines the Egyptian belief in a universe where the physical and spiritual worlds were intertwined and often seamlessly joined.

Modern Views of Sacred Space

Today's Egypolgoists focus on the anthropological study of how communities establish, maintain, and modify the division between the sacred and the profane spaces of everyday life. Modern interpretations of sacred space, particularly those influenced by postmodernism, suggest that individuals and communities attribute sacredness by projecting meaning onto a space, transforming it into something sacred, which is true. However, beyond that, the aim is to examine how such beliefs shape communal practices, the governance of the space and even the conflicts over its use rather than understand the spiritual or magical power a society seeks to evoke, protect or use by creating such as space.

In sum, anthropological approaches to sacred space emphasise its significance in shaping social and cultural identities. In ancient Egypt, however, sacredness was perceived as inherent to certain places. The Nile, temples, and tombs were not merely assigned sacredness; they were considered sacred because of their intrinsic connection to the divine cosmic order, and one might easily argue that there was no or minimal separation between the sacred and the profane for most ancient Egyptians.

Conclusion

In conclusion, sacredness in ancient Egypt was deeply embedded in the landscape, architecture, and religious practices. The temples, tombs, the Nile, and even local provinces were considered sacred spaces, each uniquely connected to the divine through numbers because numbers were divine, metaphysical connections between the gods and the realm of men. Sacred places were more than just locations; they were central to the Egyptians' understanding of the universe and their place within it. Sacred spaces demanded reverence, rituals, and offerings to maintain them. Whether through grand temples like those at Karnak or more localised sacred centres like Elephantine, the notion of sacred space in ancient Egypt offers a profound insight into the spiritual heart of this ancient civilisation.