All right, then, what if we dispense with the notion that the "Names" or the "netjeru" (gods, or aspects of God), as one prefers, are merely subjective phenomena, deciding instead that they have an objective existence, outside of our perceptions. Will this change in our assumptions allow one to salvage Johns's position? Again, the answer is "no", unless one is willing to jettison more of the House's doctrine, and a fair chunk of Egyptian mythology with it, or to embrace logical inconsistency. As making sense is not just another life choice, I see little presumption in assuming that the reader will reject the latter choice.

Were the House a Hellenic group, rather than a Kemetic/Egyptian one, and had "John" been a worshipper of Aphrodite rather than one of Sekhmet, there might be much less in the way of a philosophical issue on this point. No claim has ever been made, by the mainstream of Hellenic Traditionalism, that the Olympians created the world. Quite the contrary, the sequence of events in the myths clearly indicates that they couldn't have, since Gaea doesn't even give birth to the Titans, their ancestors, until after the world is created, in the narratives. While few modern Hellenists will take these myths literally, the message is clear - these are not transcendant deities, but rather, part of creation themselves. Were we to discover that they were local deities, limited to this world, we would have no reason to be shocked. No, not even in the case of our own beloved Aphrodite Urania, sometimes thought of as the force that moves the heavens, because the heavens on one world are not those of another.

(Just how visible is our moon, from the another star system?)

The situation in Kemetic Orthodoxy is considerably different. A number of the "Names of Netjer" are credited with the creation of the world, notably Ptah. The Names (a term of art, used by the House) are considered to be aspects of the one eternal God, creator and monarch of all that is, apparently. So, the question would arise - if the "Names" are as timeless and of such cosmic scope as they sound, why would something so intrinsic to them as an alleged "real name" be so regionally specific? What is so special about our planet, or our species, in the context of a collection of beings, or aspects of a being, who act on a cosmic scale, presumably?

Let me explain.

Earth is but one world among many. The most conservative estimate that I've every heard seriously suggested, would put over 20,000 earth-like worlds in this galaxy alone. Our own world has, as I understand, not one, but a number of species which could arguably be considered sentient, a few of which could probably move into our ecological niche rapidly, in no more than a few million years, were we to suddenly become extinct. I've heard of the baboon being suggested as one potential successor. We, ourselves, have been around for a few million years, most of it spent in our stone age, without the planet killing us off. This suggests a good life expectancy for intelligent species on this world.

One example may make for a poor survey, but there are more. Our predecessors, in our genus and closely related ones, did exist for a considerable length of time before extinction came, and extinction came, apparently, as a result of competition with other intelligent species. Such a competition will have a winner, as well as a loser, so its occurence is not an event which might sweep sentient life from this world. Not with stone age technology, at any rate.

Combine this observation with the earlier comment about the existence of potential replacements, who, were they to rise, probably would stick around as well, we are left with the impression that this planet was probably going to have at least one intelligent race walking its surface, no matter how the Cenozoic played out. Intelligence does not seem to be a thing that would be impossibly scarce, though certain bulletin boards do make one wonder. Now, since I'm sure you won't believe me if I give you the figure, drop by an Astronomy department, and ask for a conservative estimate of the number of galaxies like our own, in the visible universe. The conclusion becomes clear.

The Universe almost certainly contains inconceivably many worlds like ours, inhabited by intelligent beings not like us. Look at the wide variety of animals around us, with radically different physiologies, all the product of the same world that we arose on. Imagine what might be produced by worlds not like ours, that still produce life - but we needn't even dwell on that. Evolution clearly gets to make a great many choices along the way, in creating each species. Were reality otherwise, there wouldn't be a great many species, at least not ones so different from each other. To assume that a sentient species from a different world will have a range of vocalization similar to our own - that the sounds it can make in speech are much like the ones we can, would be severely illogical. So, what an inexplicably remarkable coincidence it would be, if these universal and unique "true names" of the lords of creation, would just happen to be ones well suited to our own voices! Why ours, and not those of some other species?

There is a naive geocentricism inherent in the very suggestion, that only gets more glaringly noticable, when one remembers that in each of the cultures the West has encountered, the local language has made use of but a small fraction of the sounds achievable by the human larynx. So, even if, by some bizarre coincidence, another species evolved the capacity to make the same sounds that we did, for the Kemetic names to rest lightly on the tounges of its members, at least one of its cultures would have had to make the same arbitrary selection of sounds to incorporate into its language as the ancient Egyptians did, or at least a collection that included those sounds. How likely is that?

So, the thought that some human language may contain words of cosmic significance is, if not certainly wrong, certainly most unlikely to be right. Let us dispense with it.

Click here to continue.