"It is one person who ennobles another; a man works for his predecessors, through the desire that what he has done will be embellished by another who shall come after him."
-- from the Teaching for Merikare (Middle Kingdom, Faulkner translation)

"Then said the Majesty of this god [i.e., Pharaoh Isesi]: 'Teach him what has been said in the past; then he will set a good example to the children of the magistrates, and judgment and all exactitude shall enter into him. Speak to him, for there is none born wise.'"
-- from the Maxims of Ptahhotep (Middle Kingdom, Faulkner translation)

"This [funerary offering] is the breath of the mouth, excellent for the noble dead!
It is nothing wearisome. You shall be an imperishable star, a star in 'She-of-a-thousand-(shining)-souls.'"
-- from the stela of Nebipusenwosret (Middle Kingdom, Parkinson translation)

One of the cornerstones of Kemetic Orthodox faith, and indeed one of the hallmarks of African faiths, is the veneration of ancestors. Note that the word "veneration" is used, and not "worship." In many Victorian-era and forward anthropology and history books, "Ancestor Worship" is invoked as a "primitive" practice of those unenlightened Third World souls who supposedly think their own forefathers are divinities, until the missionaries of course can set them straight. Ancestor Worship ranks with Taboos and Fertility Symbols as the unholy trinity of a "savage" society a la Frazier and Freud, something that separates "us" from "them." Perhaps if Frazier and Freud had paid a little bit of attention to their own ancestors, they wouldn't have been so quick to write off the practice of ancestor veneration, especially as one can put a fairly "modern" spin on the whole process without violating any spirit of the ancient whole.

You are a product of your ancestry. Within you, on a submolecular level, chemicals turn switches on and off, or have been set permanently, so that you have red hair and blue eyes, or dark or light skin, or a tongue you can curl, or earlobes or left-handedness. These chemical switches didn't get there by coincidence: they are the result of a secret "language" called DNA. Our DNA isn't picked from the ether; it comes directly from our parents. And where did they get theirs? Their parents. And so on, and so forth.... your very body is a book - the book of your family, your people, your identity. You are a reflection of every person who has gone before you, in every time period, on every continent, in every history. Those people live within you just as surely as Grandma says you have Grandpa's eyes. Through heredity, we never die - we live on through our children, and our children's children, forever.

The ancient Egyptians understood their ancestors to be Akhu, a word which can be translated "Shining ones." Why shining? Symbolically it was believed that the spirits of our ancestors could ascend to the heaven, to the starry belly of Nut, and be stars, twinkling down on us. When you go outside at night, look up. Your forefathers will look down, and the circuit is complete. Honor your Akhu, and they will honor you. This is what ancestor veneration is all about - the circle of life, between this realm and the realm of spirit, between birth and death and everything living.

Veneration of our ancestors does not mean pretending Great Grandpa was God. It does mean being conscious of the paths, genetic and otherwise, which converged to bring us to this place at this moment - why we are who we are. Knowing your ancestors is the first part of veneration. Who were they? Why were they? What sorts of people were they, if we can know? This can run the gamut from simple stories to tracing your genealogy. Each person in your family tree is a wealth of information - a contribution to the leaf which is You.

Get to know these people. Whether you like them or not, they are a part of you. Embrace them. Learn from them, their mistakes as well as their accomplishments. The House of Netjer engages in a specific set of rites for Akhu veneration which includes the pouring of ritual water on behalf of those who have gone before us. Make offering to your ancestors, not as gods, but as something less than God and more than human - our potential, as it were, the sum total of our identities - our family. Your ancestors will talk back.

In antiquity, a good way to get to know one's ancestors was to write "letters to the dead" - letters just like you would write to a living person, except these were delivered to a tomb, ostensibly to be read by the spirit of the deceased person to whom they had been addressed. "How are you?" begins one such letter, from a husband to his dead wife. "Is the West treating you well?....May you appear before me as a blessed one...that I may see you fighting for me in a dream." Another letter, this from a wife to her deceased husband, a little more insistent: "As for our serving maid, who is ill....why do you want your threshold to be made desolate? Fight for her - now! Watch over her!" A man writes to a dead friend, to absolve himself of past grief: "Look, it wasn't me who harmed him. Others did it." Others invoke prayers for protection, or just share the news. At the holy city of Abdju (Abydos), thousands upon thousands of such "dead letters," scribed on pots, were buried in the sand before the holy mountains, for thousands of years, creating a cemetery of communication, as it were - so many in fact that the modern day Egyptians call this place "the Mother of Pots."

Thanks to the diligent work of one of our Shemsu and our House webmaster, we have created a "virtual Mother of Pots" for letters to the Akhu of the Faith. You are welcome to join us in our veneration, to learn something of those who have gone before us - and in time (as we set up this area on the site more fully) to add to it yourself, if you so choose. It is truly stated in Kemetic texts, that so long as a person is mentioned, he or she cannot die. If this is so, then our ancestors shall live forever and eternally, with the offering of a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, a thousand of beef and fowl, a thousand of oil and alabaster and cloth, and all good things upon which an Akh might live....