As we have said, by adopting this alternative hypothesis as his position, he will be discarding on of the stronger arguments that Kemetic Orthodoxy has for adopting monolatry (the belief that the different 'gods' or 'netjeru' are merely aspects of a single deity) in an Egyptian Reconstructionist context: chains of identification.

To see why that is, let us examine the argument.

In one passage, one will see the suggestion that deity A is one with deity B, as part of some more complex composite being. In another, perhaps in another document, perhaps not, one will see a similar relationship suggested between deity B and deity C. Thus, with the certainty of a syllogism, one might think, one may conclude that deity A and deity C must be two aspects of one and the same being:



deity A is deity B,

so : all who are deity A, are deity B

deity B is deity C,

so : all who are deity B, are deity C

therefore, we conclude

all who are deity A, are deity C


and the argument can be reversed, establishing that all who are deity C are deity A, implying that the two are one and the same : one is the former if and only if one is the latter. So, where will this argument break down?

The hidden assumption in the argument, aside from the one that we can place absolute confidence in each of our texts, is that not only are the first and second statements true at the time of their writing, but that they are both correct now, if our syllogisms (and thus, our conclusion) to be regarded as relevant, today. For the conclusion to be valid at all, there must have been some time when both statements were truthful.

An example may clarify the potential fallacy : In 1760, an author could truthfully write that Philadelphia and London lay in a common nation-state: both were on British soil. Some centuries earlier, one could truthfully say the same about London and Mont-St.Michel: both lay in the Anglevin Empire, acquired by the Duchy of Normandy. Using a similar argument, in which we set up syllogisms as above, naively ignoring the question of tense (or even more naively, taking transitivity as a given, without further argument), one could conclude that Philadelphia and Mont-St.Michel lay in the same country. But, that has never been true, at least not yet.

If gods, like nation states, can both divide and merge, then arguments for unity of identity based on chains of identifications made over the centuries break down, because we have no assurance that these statements were ever true simultaneously, much less all true today.

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