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The Last Supper (Darkness Overtakes Light)
Forty days after the burial of Ausar’s (Osiris’) seeds into Mother Earth—Auset (Isis)—Ausar met his demise. In the typical Ancient Egyptian story form, Plutarch writes in his Moralia, Vol. V (356, 13), about how Ausar was invited by Set (Seth) to a feast where Set and his accomplices tricked Ausar into laying down in a makeshift coffin. Plutarch continues with...
. . . . and those who were in the plot ran to it and slammed down the lid, which they fastened by nails from the outside and also by using molten lead. Then they carried the chest to the river and sent it on its way to the sea through the Tanitic Mouth. Wherefore the Egyptians even to this day name this mouth the hateful and execrable. Such is the tradition. They say also that the date on which this deed was done was the 17th day of Athor [27 November], when the sun passes through Scorpion.
The events of 17 Hatoor/Athor (27 November), as reported by Plutarch, have all the elements of the biblical Jesus’ Last Supper, i.e. a conspiracy, feast, friends, and betrayal. However, for the Ancient Egyptians, there are other meanings to the story. Plutarch, in Moralia Vol V (366, 39D), wrote:
The story told of the shutting up of Osiris in the chest seems to mean nothing else than the vanishing and disappearance of water. . . . at the time when. . . . the Nile recedes to its low level and the land becomes denuded. As the nights grow longer, the darkness increases, and the potency of the light is abated and subdued. . . .
The antagonistic relationship between Ausar (Osiris) and Set (Seth)—as it relates to environmental conditions—is mentioned by Plutarch, Moralia Vol V (364, 33B), as such:
. . . The Egyptians simply give the name of Ausar [Osiris] to the whole source and faculty creative of moisture, believing this to be the cause of generation and the substance of life-producing seed; and the name of Set [Typhon in Greek] they give to all that is dry, fiery, and arid, in general, and antagonistic to moisture. . . .. . . The insidious scheming and usurpation of Set [Typhon], then, is the power of drought, which gains control and dissipates the moisture which is the source of the Nile and of its rising. . . .
The Loss of Ausar (Osiris) is now celebrated in the Abu Sefein Mouled at the same time and with the same traditions, i.e. a big feast followed by to a 40-day cycle of figurative death—by fasting and other disciplinary means.
28 days after the Last Supper is the birth/rebirth of the renewed king on 25 December.
40 days after the Last Supper is Epiphany.
Family Reunion
As noted earlier, the reason for the annual Ancient Egyptian festivals are renewals and rejuvenation of the life of the cosmos. Ancient and Baladi Egyptians do not categorize the activities at the festivals as sacred or mundane. As such, the gay and secular side of religious ceremonies is an essential part of the Egyptian festivals. The sports, games, theatres, shadow-plays, coffee booths, beer booths, sweet stalls, eating houses, the meeting of friends, the singing, the dancing, and the laughter, are as much part of a mouled as the religious processions and the visits to the shrines of the Walis (folk saints).
The mouled is a family reunion between the spirits of the past—the Walis—and the spirits of the present—the visitors of all ages. The Ancient Egyptian texts and the wall reliefs draw a colorful and graphic picture of the way in which the deceased Wali and his visitors met in and near the shrines, which became houses of the joy of the heart on that occasion.
According to early writers such as Strabo, people from all classes and ages attended these festivals. Herodotus stated that 700,000 people attended the joyful festival (mouled) of Bast (Bastet), right outside Zagazig in the Nile Delta.
In addition to the reunion between the Wali and the people, the mouled allows for other various kinds of reunions, such as:
The main objectives of these mouleds’ attendants are: