Ma'at was the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, Justice and Order. Her headdress ostrich feather served as the ultimate arbiter of the goodness of a man's life, and was balanced against a newly deceased person's heart on the scales of justice as a precondition of being permitted to pass into the Afterlife. Those whose hearts were heavy with wicked deeds had their souls devoured immediately by the demigod Ammin. Only those whose were lighter than Ma'at's feather were permitted to pass through into immortality with the Gods.
Poll
Is Tomorrow "The Day" (And Ya'll Know What I Mean)
This morning when I turned my computer on there was an article about a thirteen year old Somalian girl (Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow) being stoned to death while a thousand witnesses watched in an auditorium. Her crime was saying that she had been raped. She was charged with adultery (apparently she somehow managed to commit it alone, since she was stoned alone).
I read the Quran, I read the Bible, I read about Ma'at, I'm obsessed with a kind of balanced justice and I talk very strongly sometimes.
The article made me angry, on so many different levels, for how that situation came to be, for the Aisha herself,and for even the people who watched, here and there.
It also made me feel a chill of fear. Usually I am so strongly protesting this or that, I don't want a world where my thirteen year old daughter is dragged out alone to face stones.
So alone, so powerless, no one to stand up for her, to say that she was sincere, confused, too young, but honest and brave. I wished I could have been there for her, I would have stood in front of the whole auditorium of people and even if I was stoned too, every person would have heard about real justice, about balance and how it wasn't in attacking a little girl alone. (I'm a fool, one of these days I'm going to get killed because I'm the type of person that stands alone in front of a group of Hell's Angels and yammers out "oh, no you don't, that isn't right.)
I feel like I need a sense of direction, a sense of where I want to go and why, because I'm so often angry about injustice for one reason or another, but I don't want to exchange one kind of injustice for another.
One of my aunts got into tracing our family tree through genetics and records and found that we're not nearly as diluted as I might have thought, apparently from my mother's side, we're from somewhere in the midnorthernparts of Africa. It makes sense,a lot of the older philosophy really connects with how I think.
My mother spent some time in Africa and I thought it would be a good experience and go there for awhile (we have some second cousins living there now)instead of just reading things. I haven't done it yet.
I feel a huge sense of repressed anger about everything that I hear about in this country, I want to lash out but I bite my tongue, then I read something like that, and I feel violent too.
Reading about these things (like Aisha) and I feel a sense of fear of being caught between a rock and a hard place, with injustice on every side, coming from every color; like an attack dog on a short leash and every child is ready to hit me with a stick, and I don't really know who my enemy is, or if its truly anyone but only injustice itself; but I feel the desire to bite so badly I can barely contain it. Where is the justice, where is the balance in this world? Who is abiding by Ma'at? (in a manner of speaking)
According to one book I have, it says the Pharoahs (who were god-kings) said that if even they were not "beloved of Ma'at" that first they would lose themselves, then they would lose Egypt, and THEN even the whole world would move towards destruction of order; when I see the lack of justice, order, and balance, the pain it brings in the human world, and the catastrophe it brings in the natural world, I would have to say it sounds like the Priesthood of ancient Egypt was exactly right. What direction will lead me to that balance, justice, and order?
