THE PYRAMIDS of the COLD • Chapter 14 When the 'Lady of the Well' Taweret plug finally moves and becomes 'Mother of Fire' magical Opet: the sparkling rocks metaphor

Avant-propos: we’ve already seen many times that ancient Egyptians have represented and glorified many parts of the Great Pyramid’s operation into many different deities, depending on either what precise characteristic they wanted to emphasize, or in what particular point of the global operating cycle this part was about, like the many representations of the two central hauling ropes (the active and ascending Isis, the inactive and coiled upon the drive shaft Seshat, the descending Nephthys), or the many visions of the impactor (Horus, Ra, Osiris, bulls, rams, falcons, etc). In this chapter, we’ll see that the exact same process has been used for what I’ve been calling until today, the ‘Taweret block’, the ‘upper granite plug’ which sealed what I’ve called the ‘inclined well’.

What I didn’t realize, is that this Taweret block, the plug of the inclined well, was also engaged into some kind of operating cycle, because of the way the well has been drained.

You know Taweret is probably my favorite goddess, and it is probably mostly because of how it got associated with the Bes and Beset temporary anchor block: once the Great Pyramid had accomplished its purpose, the Taweret block has been beautifully ‘moved’ to the position it still has today, only a few meters away from its original position which can be very precisely determined by what is left of the Bes and Beset anchor block (the little granite block that is still imbedded today in the floor of the lower part of the ascending passage, you can call it Beset, because this really is its name).

What it means, is that ancient Egyptians wouldn’t have deified this huge granite block (the so-called upper granite plug of the ascending passage) into the only hippopotamus goddess Taweret: they would certainly have created at least one more goddess which wouldn’t be about the time when the Pyramid was in operation, but when the Pyramid had to be shut down and the inclined well drained of its water.

This chapter is about the other hippopotamus goddess of ancient Egypt: Opet and all the metaphors that have been used to represent the fact that at some point:

• the Taweret plug had to move and slide inside the ‘empty’ or ‘dry’ bottom end of the inclined well

• the Taweret plug had to be stopped at all cost before destroying the very bottom of the passage

We’ll see that the reason why the hippopotamus goddess Opet is associated with fire, it is because when the Taweret plug did ram and hit the shock absorber block (the middle granite plug of the ascending passage), the immobilized Taweret had actually been transformed into the moving Opet and the tremendous shock would have looked like two gigantic rocks struck together, just like you do when you want to start a fire by only using sparkling rocks.

Operating diagram of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, showing the inclined well and its temporary plug that was the Taweret granite block. At the end of the operating period of the Pyramid, the Taweret plug had to be pushed down so that the water of the well could be drained towards the subterranean chamber.

Photograph of the cavity of Al-Ma'mun, showing the Taweret/Opet plug [block A] and the upper part of the shock absorber [block B]: Plate LXIV, page 166 of "Great Pyramid Passages", Volume 1, by John and Morton Edgar, 1910. Excerpt about this plate written by Morton Edgar: “In order to reach the upper end of the Granite Plug, and so ascend the First Ascending Passage, we require to scale the south-east wall of this cavernous space. During my first week here, I secured two photographs showing Hadji Ali Gabri climbing this wall — Plates LXIV and LXV. In both of these he is seen standing "with one foot on a ledge which is situated about three feet above the loose, sandy floor of the space, and the other in a notch. By taking advantage of this ledge and of the notches, we made the ascent at that time without undue difficulty.” https://archive.org/details/GreatPyramidPassagesVol11910Edition/page/n174/mode/1up

The cavity of Al-Ma'mun only served the purpose of collecting the waters of the inclined well for the shutdown procedure of the pyramid. The water has been collected and redirected through the funnel-shaped cavity towards the descending passage for evacuation. The draining of the well has been triggered by the breaking of the wedging block (a block glorified afterwards in the Bes deity), and which ended with the release of the Taweret plug of the well.

14.01  Taweret was also known as the ‘Lady of the well’

I doubt very much many egyptologists ever tried to explain why the goddess of childbirth Taweret was also known as the ‘Lady of the well’. The funny thing is that if ancient Egyptians used thousands of metaphors to glorify their scientific and technological accomplishments to create their ‘religion’, this ‘Lady of the well’ thing isn’t even a metaphor: we really have to take it literally, and of course the well is the inclined well of the Great Pyramid.

"Of the twelve objects within this catalogue that include hieroglyphic epithets of Taweret… three of them make clear mention of her role as a goddess of water. While it is not unthinkable that a hippopotamus goddess should be associated with water, it is still quite unusual that a quarter of all epithets of the goddess which survive from Deir el-Medina feature this role so heavily. The epithets preserved in Deir el-Medina refer to “the pure water”, “lady of the well” and "Taweret, who is in the midst of the purification waters of Nun”. "The Hippopotamus of Deir el-Medina",  page 30, by Anneke Stracke: https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2624829/view

14.02  Why draining the inclined well... with 'panache'

So they didn’t want to use low-tech to drain the well. Instead, they’ve used the most demonstrative technique they could’ve think of, a technique that would have required probably the most complex and onerous installation in all the Pyramid; a technique that would have required a very sophisticate succession of extremely well adjusted steps.

This technique was triggered by the release of the Taweret plug. Probably, the height of water had simply been augmented by flooding the central wooden caisson, and it would have break the Bes and Beset anchor block, releasing Taweret. But of course, for that to work implied that:

• all the structural integrity of the lower end of the well was guarantied and saved from any displacement in the blocks arrangement

• something had to stop the Taweret plug from destroying the very end of the well before some rock would block the ascending passage

To achieve that, two things were realized:

• the entire lower half of the well isn’t constituted of regular stones, but of gigantic girdle stones only pierced in their center to create the well

• the addition of a shock absorber block that would have stopped Taweret

Section 6 about the Girdle Stones: the-pyramids-of-the-cold-v2/section-6-well-girdle-stones.html

14.03  The perfect and very modern analogy of the technique used to trigger the draining of the inclined of the Great Pyramid: the building demolition with explosives

Above illustration: "The second, widely televised demolition of a Pruitt–Igoe building on April 21, 1972, with explosives at St. Louis, Missouri, USA (1972)". U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Pruitt-igoe_collapse-series.jpg

'Book of the Dead' of Ani (frame 37) at the British Museum. “The hippopotamus goddess Opet stands to the right; behind two altars decorated with lotuses and heaped with loaves of bread, a haunch of meat, a bull's head, onions, grapes, gourds and cos lettuces. In a form identical with the better-known hippopotamus goddess, Taweret, she wears horns, a sun disc and rests on a protective 'sa'-sign. Opet offers life and a flaming taper for warmth to the deceased. The text above her is in praise of Hathor, patroness of the west, who is represented as a cow emerging from the western mountain at Thebes into the clumps of papyrus that fringe the Nile Valley.”: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA10470-37

14.04  The many hippopotamus goddesses and the reason why you can’t distinguish one from another

Ok, so now it really is getting very interesting. We’ve seen many times that ancient Egyptians when it came to glorify their scientific and technological accomplishments, didn’t behave like we would have. If today we’d want to glorify, let’s say a car, we would probably create 3 deities: one for the chassis, one for the motor and one for the body. It would be a modern ‘triad’.

But Egyptians would have done differently: for every single deity of our modern triads, they would have created many deities. It is what they did for the two central hauling ropes directly connected to the impactor (the ascending Isis, the descending Nephthys and Seshat coiled upon the drive shaft), and it is what they did for the many representations of the impactor itself, depending on every position in the operating cycle of each component.

One impactor, but many gods (hawk for the speed, bull for the power, ram for the impact with the waters of the well, crocodile for the way it is slipping into the water, etc.). For the Taweret plug, they did the same thing. Except for one thing: this time, egyptologists all agree to say there may be many different hippopotamus goddesses, but they are indistinguishable one from another. And this is crucial, because if you cannot distinguish one hippopotamus goddess from another one, it is only because they are all about the exact same thing; but at different moment in time, and maybe in different aspects of that same thing.

“Learn how to start a primitive fire using two rocks struck together.” Primitive Survival Fire Using Only Rocks, by Far North Bushcraft And Survival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IpjRyTMvbI

14.05  The Taweret/Opet plug [block A] ramming into its shock absorber block [B], granite against granite: if Opet was known as the hippopotamus 'Mother of Fire' it was because of the sparkling rocks metaphor

Many people tried to figure out what the three granite blocks of the so-called ‘granite plug’ that is today at the bottom of the ‘ascending passage’ were really about and they all have some theories explaining were they were coming from. The academic explanation is that these blocks were first stored at the top of the Grand Gallery, and were released after the ‘burial’ of Khufu, as protection against robbers.

This is the academic explanation, and it doesn’t even care that these blocks wouldn’t be able to pass through the upper part of the ‘ascending passage’. Why bother? Of course, egyptologists only tried to find an easy explanation: the three blocks are right now at the very bottom of a slope, so the easy explanation is that these blocks were first at the very top of that slope, and then were released. But what really happened really is more complicate and subtle at the same time. If the inclined well was flooded on top of the Taweret plug, it probably wasn’t the case below the plug. I’m actually not completely sure of that, because maybe it was.

But there is one information that goes with the idea it wasn’t flooded, and it comes from another Egyptian vision of the Taweret plug. Taweret is about the plug, still and put at the bottom of the well, just like the photograph of the hippopotamus at the San Diego Zoo, but Opet isn’t about that.

Opet is undistinguishable from Taweret, but she is the one known as ‘the Mother of Fire’. Can anyone tell me how a hippopotamus goddess so strongly associated with water, can be at the same time the Mother of Fire?

It doesn’t make any sense, unless the bottom part of the well, under the Taweret plug wasn’t flooded at all. Because then, when Taweret is released and propelled into the shock absorber block (the middle granite block), the two of them would have looked like two gigantic sparkling rocks, struck together, trying to make fire.

From our modern point of view, we can say that Opet = Taweret = the Mother of Fire. Except that for the ancient Egyptians, they wanted to separate the two aspects of the plug by creating theses two goddesses.

Of course, the other hippopotamus goddesses are also about the same huge and gray granite block, but they are about the glorification of another aspect of it, and it would have to be determined as well.

“As the Mistress of Magical Protection, she [Opet, also Ipy, Ipet, Apet] is referred to in a spell for divination by lamp (Leyden Papyrus col. VI, ll. 18-19) as Ipy, “Mother of Fire.” Similarly, in the Book of the Dead, Spell 137B, “for kindling the flame” shows “Ipy, lady of magical protection” setting fire to a bowl of incense. An ostracon (inscribed pottery fragment) invokes Ipy as a protector against nightmares who massacres the demons [the ramming metaphor] responsible for them.” https://iseumsanctuary.com/2020/04/28/ipy-the-hippopotamus-goddess-mistress-of-magical-protection/

14.06  At this point, I still didn't have find out in which deity the shock-absorber block [block B] has been glorified into

Image of the hippopotamus goddess Taweret/Opet from ‘The Book of the Faiyum’, “the modern name of a text that describes the Faiyum oasis as the mythical center of prosperity and ritual. The text was compiled during the Greco-Roman period, perhaps in the temple of the crocodile god Sobek in Shedet (Greek: Crocodilopolis; Arabic: Medinet el-Faiyum), but it may be based on precedents from earlier periods. The most famous copy of this text, known as the Boulaq/Hood/Amherst papyrus, consists of two papyrus scrolls with hieroglyphic text and illustrations. Portions of this papyrus are now in the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore), the Morgan Library & Museum (New York), and the Egyptian Museum (Cairo). Besides this and other hieroglyphic versions, there are also hieratic and Demotic copies on papyrus and an unillustrated hieroglyphic version inscribed on the walls of the Sobek temple in Kom Ombo (Upper Egypt).” The Book of the Faiyum, at the Walters Art Museum: https://art.thewalters.org/detail/24264/the-book-of-the-faiyum-2/

Preface

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Table of contents

Operating diagrams of the Great Pyramid

Timelines

Index