From: JBR
Date: 25 Dec 1999
Time: 16:45:48
Remote Name: 171.215.188.201
Dear RPW please find below an excerpt from THE SIRIUS MYSTERY by Robert Temple
From: The Sirius Mystery ROBERT TEMPLE P. 251-253
Now we must turn our attention to the mysterious Egyptian word tcham. A general meaning of tcham is ‘sceptre’, possibly because the meaning of tcham en Anpu is the name of ‘the magical sceptre of Anpu (Anubis)’.Tcha mtl are ‘bowmen’ and Sirius is the Bow Star, as we know. Now, the really intriguing meaning of tcham is ‘a kind of precious metal’ .There are various expressions in the literature such as ‘the finest tcham’ ,‘real tcham’, and ‘tcham from the hill-top’. The impression one gets is that this tcham is a pretty special commodity. Presumably Anubis’s sceptre, which is the tcham sceptre, is made of this tcham material. A sceptre is an object which exercises rule and force. The fact that there is ‘tcham from the hill-top’ could either have a mundane meaning to the effect that the stuff is a metal mined in the hills or more likely is connected with Anubis, not only through his sceptre, but through the hilltop as the residence of the god in the ziggurat sense such as one finds in Sumer. For Anubis was known as ‘Anubis of the hill’. In Wallis Budge we find more information from Pyramid Texts about tch am.10 The references are entirely stellar. There is a description of the deceased Pharaoh, in this case Pepi I. Pepi’s father is Tem ‘the great god of An (Heliopolis) and the first living Man-god; the creator of heaven and earth’. In Sumer too the great god of An was the creator of heaven and earth, but there was not, as far as we know, a city named after him as was the Egyptian city of An which came to be known to the Greeks as Heliopolis. Of Pepi we read in the text that ‘the appearance of this god in heaven, which is like unto the appearance of Tem in heaven’. This is all gross flattery — typical for the texts mourning the dead Pharaohs. Every Pharaoh looks like the great god of An and every other great god and does every conceivable celestial thing. The Pharaoh is dead, long live the Pharaoh! Now various gods, including the Governor of the Land of the Bow and Sept (Sirius) ‘under his trees’, carry a ladder for Pepi. Pepi then ‘appeareth on the two thighs of Isis, Pepi reposeth on the two thighs of Nephthys’. Tern puts Pepi at the head of all the gods, and ‘Pepi setteth out in his boat’ with Horus. He then stands ‘among the imperishable stars, which stand up on their tcham sceptres, and support themselves on their staves’. This seems to make clear that the metal tcham is also a specifically stellar material which supports the stars!* Then we read: ‘This Pepi liveth life more than your sceptres Au.’ The word au au means ‘dog, jackal’, and I suspect a connection with ‘dog star’ and Anubis who is jackal/dog. Also the Au-ten A then is the Au-t of the sun, or ‘the course of the sun’. But, to resume: O ye gods of the Sky, ye imperishable ones, who sail over the Land of Tehenu [the Tehentiu are ‘the sparkling gods, the stellar luminaries’ from tehen which means ‘to sparkle, to scintillate’] in your boats, and direct them with your sceptres, this Pepi directeth his boat with you by means of the uas sceptre [Uasar is a variant form of Asar, the name of Osiris, and uas-t is ‘a kind of animal, dog (?)‘12] and the tcham sceptre, and he is fourth with you. [indicating that he joins a group of three stars!] 0 ye gods of heaven, ye imperishable ones, who sail over the Land of Tahennu, who transport yourselves by means of your sceptres, this Pepi transporteth himself with you by means of the uas and tcham' and he is the fourth with you.. . . This Pepi is the Anes matter which cometh forth from Nephthys. . . . Pepi is a star . . . Pepi is Sept, under his sebt trees . . . The star Septet (Sothis) graspeth the hand of Pepi. Pepi plougheth the earth . . . Osiris fPepi is addressed by the name), thou art the double of all the gods. [Uas is also the Egyptian name of Thebes.] pretty interesting HuH? especially if you couple this info with L. Gardners "Star Fire" ATICLES IN NEXIS MAG more later and post if you are stillout there JBR
* The Greeks had a tradition of ‘the strongest metal’ and called it adamant. Kronos used it to castrate Ouranos (Uranus); mythically it was the strongest metal. Here we see the dead Pharaoh Pepi’s celestial after-death experiences described. He goes to the stellar regions and joins three stars, becoming ‘the fourth’. He uses three sceptres for power, the Au (similar to a word for dog/jackal), the uas (also the name of Thebes, similar to another word for dog, and related to a variant form of the name of Osiris), and the tcham (a mysterious metal and the sceptre of the dog/jackal-headed god Anubis). The star Sirius is specifically described as taking his hand. Pepi himself is transformed into a star, as clearly stated: ‘Pepi is a star.’ He becomes a star and his hand is taken by the star Sirius, which can only mean that he becomes a star in the Sirius system, and he ‘becomes fourth with them’ . He then is identified in turn with the three other stars of the Sirius system, which are Isis-Sothis, Nephthys, and Osiris. The first emits ‘Anes matter’, the second is the female Nephthys, which may be identical with the ‘female Sorgho’ or Sirius C of the Dogon (though sometimes Nephthys refers to Sirius B in other contexts), and the third is called ‘the double of all the gods’ — being the circling companion and the archetypal ‘double’ of many figures from Isis to Gilgamesh. This is quite obviously Sirius B. And there is tcham, the mysterious, potent stellar ‘metal’ which is said to be the power of Anubis, whom we have earlier identified as the personification of the orbit of Sirius B. And tcham is quite similar to the word we dealt with earlier, tchens, meaning ‘weight’, and its related forms tens heavy, weight’, tensrnen ‘to be heavy’ and the similar word teng ‘dwarf. If we spoke of something described only by a series of these apparently related words, namely: tchens tens teng tcham, the meaning would be, quite literally, allowing for the absence of proper grammar, ‘the weight (of) heavy dwarf star-metal’, remembering that tcham is also specifically identified as the power of the god Anubis whom we have identified previously as the orbit of Sirius B, the dwarf star composed of super-heavy ‘star-metal’ . Concerning this star-metal it is as well to take notice that in ‘Isis and Osiris’ (376 B), Plutarch says of the Egyptians:13 ‘Moreover, they call the lodestone the bone of Horus, and iron the bone of Typhon, as Manetho records’ (Manetho fragment 77.) Recall that ‘the bones of Earth’ in ancient tradition are stones. It is interesting that a heavy metal is ‘the bone’ of Typhon which we have earlier determined as a description of Sirius B. And magnetized iron or lodestone is ‘the bone’ of Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. This is exactly the sort of tradition one would expect. We must recall that Anubis is our form of writing the actual Egyptian word Anp or Anpu. The verb Anp means ‘to wrap around’, obviously connected with Anubis’s role as sacred embalmer. It is significant that Anp heni is ‘a jackal-headed god who guarded the river of fire, a form of Anubis’ . We have already postulated that ‘the river of fire’ may be a way of describing the orbit of the star Sirius B, so it is quite interesting to see that Anubis, whom we have already identified as representing the orbit, is specifically said to be the guardian of the same river of fire. And ‘wrap around’ could have an orbital meaning as well as its obvious meaning of ‘swathe’ . We recall that a special description of tcham given in Wallis Budge’s Dictionary was ‘tcham from the hill-top’. Also we have just equated tcham with Anubis. So it should not surprise us that a title of Anubis is Tepi tu-f ‘he who is on his hill’. As I mentioned a moment ago, this seems to be a ziggurat-concept such as one finds in Mesopotamia.
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