Previously I mentioned The Book of the Heavenly Cow. Basic idea is Ra gets pissed at humanity and sends one of his "eyes" (in this case Hathor, a fertility goddess, operating as a sort of cosmic enforcer of Ra's will). Hathor starts the slaughter, driving humanity out into the desert, and in the process of giving into her blood lust becomes essentially Sekhet (a chaos god). In any case, Ra rethinks the whole "kill all humans" bit and this is when we have the thousands of gallons of beer dyed red to look like blood. And fortunately for humanity Hathor isn't a mean drunk.
(I'm reading the Budge translation right now, and there's real blood in the beer, along with mandrake roots for an extra-special sleepy-time potion. Two thirds of the story is basically about Ra's retirement and a re-organization of heaven. It opens with a description of the aged Ra whose bones have become like silver and hair like lapis lazuli...what strange sea change indeed!)
So after this (and on Ra's urging) it becomes an annual festival, part of the ever-moving cycle of seasonal festivals. This is one where the Egyptians both celebrate and re-enact by getting blind stinking drunk then (apparently) having group sex. Very typical solstice sort of thing here. (The bit about moveable feasts is that the Egyptian calendar had 360 days, plus five "don't really exist" spooky days, but no leap year; so over a thousand years or so the calendar would rotate through a whole cycle until the harvest festival was actually at harvest time again, instead of in some entirely other month. Anyhow).
So I also caught a program on Exodus from an Egyptian History perspective. Which is pretty much a "what Egyptian history?" perspective; there's no Hebrew slaves, no massacre of chariots, Pharaoh and all in the Red Sea, and of course the Pyramids were built a thousand years earlier and by paid labor to boot (we have copies of their pay stubs). But there are some tantalizing glimpses into what the writers of Exodus may have been inspired by. Including the Hyksos, a somewhat mysterious and seemingly Semitic people who controlled Egypt during the Second Interregnum.
And the plagues struck me at this time as a strange echo of the Hathor story. There's all sorts of weird little not-really-parallels, like the role of the ureas and the staffs of Pharaoh's court magicians turning into snakes. And, you know, the whole driven-into-the-desert thing. But then, if you are going to be a bronze age people in that corner of the world sand, snakes, floods, fertility, locusts, and blood are pretty much to be expected.
And, yes, the way the court magicians act is not unlike how court magicians act in stories like Teta the Magician.
It still makes me think that some sort of red tide, a scarlet sign much like the weed that mysteriously sprung up around London in the H.G. Wells novel, fits for my story. There's stuff in Heavenly Cow about Nu as well, a goddess of, well, call it the primordial soup; a god of the outer chaos/water but also the fecundity that water brings (annual flooding of the Nile, after all). And of course a primary duty of Rameses III is maintaining maat, order; which makes the appropriate thematic climax of the story the Battle of the Delta.
(And if I ever opened a small restaurant Primordial Soup would definitely be on the menu. What's in it? I dunno...all the essential amino acids, I suppose...)
And I'm realizing more and more that so much of the fun here is the interaction between cultures. Between people from a Mycenaean Greek and a New Kingdom Egyptian viewpoint, at the very least. It would be so much fun to write with. It will also be a heck of a lot of work to get there.
Images are all from Nina Paley's series of short animations from Exodus, collected with other stories under the general heading "Seder-Masochism."
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