Return of Ma’at – The Sacred Balance & Weighing of the Soul

The ancient Egyptian goddesses were known to be 'grief eaters' who renewed life.

We call upon the winged women; The Owl Woman, the Swan Woman, the Vulture Woman, the Raven Woman…

We call upon the big-bellowed, the clawed, the mud-walkers, the scaled belly-crawlers, the Serpent-Dragon Woman…

We call upon the sacred balance of light and dark, the sacred duality, the knower of creation, the twin-magic weaver.

This summer at our Biodelics retreat, we had a dream incubation temple, based on the ancient rites of Asclepius, and the older feminine magic he rested upon. It was led by a tea ceremony with Madame Mugwort. She would not let me begin the ceremony until we had held a slightly impromptu Grief Ceremony. We circled the altar, keening, praising, wailing, silent, softening.

Like a Plant version of Ma’at, Mugwort perused our hearts and nodded her green leafy head. We could begin. There was an elemental ceremony first, with four women wearing directional masks. And one wearing a bee mistress mask. I was harping and wearing a black swan mask, handstitched by a dear friend. Our IxCacaoist completed the magic map with the white swan mask.

Afterwards, we were all sat around the fires of the candles, bathed in that magic that dissolves words on the tongue like sherbert. We would drift from magical silence, to bawdy laughter, and back again, like a feminine yo-yo. The night was stretching out.

I could feel a big dream brewing inside me, as if spirit world were turning up the volume. That night I dreamed about Grief.

I know so many of us are feeling heavy right now. In a world that doesn’t make space for heaviness. Our hearts are heavy, we sigh. Our feet seem to drag across the earth, if we looked down on the right moonlit night, we might even see our hidden claws.

This heaviness is like a trick or treat bag that seems to hold everything. Personal, collective, jarringly modern, achingly ancient.

We miss the light. We cherish the small moments, and yet that shadow is still there. Haunting us. We are tired of running.

We dream of the renewal, but the washing machine is still going on rinse-and-repeat. We are threadbare, shrunken, damp.

There is the grief with big eyes, staring at us from the corner of the room. Beckoning. If you stare back, you’ll see her mirrors.

The heaviness wants to be heavy and held fully. And that’s the alchemy. To allow the gravitas, the gravidas of pregnancy.

We have to not only trust the heaviness, but to surrender to it, and to allow ourselves to rest into the bigness of the impossible.

There is a conclave gathered around us right now, holding the wisdom of the ancient soul midwife rites, waiting to rebirth us.

Gravity is a goddess. There is something supernatural in this magic that our ancient cultures knew, and then we went and forgot.

Now is the time to remember our wings and roots, to call upon banished goddesses who have been waiting for these times.

Swan Rites & Dragon Feet  

In ceremony and myth around the world, it was winged women and goddesses who brought the medicine of life, death/rebirth, redemption. She was liminal, a cosmic flight attendant, an intermediary, a messenger. In Christian symbol, she was an Angel.

The symbol of the Swan (a shapeshifter bearing large white feathered wings) is a universal sign of alchemy and enlightenment.

But before we can take flight on her back, light as a feather, we must first come all the way down, into the debris of our heart, into the realms of our bodies, the limbs of our sufferings, the feet that have walked too many miles, down the stairs of darkness.

In Egyptian lore, we descend down into the Hall of Two Truths, the realm of the goddess Ma’at, wearing an ostrich feather in her head, bearing the scales of justice and balance, supported by Anpu, the dog-deity of the underworld, and Osiris, its wild god.

Inside the dark chambers of the Duat, the traveler between the worlds faced 42 judges, called ‘Neters’ the gods and laws of nature.

During this trial the person is made to recite 42 negative confessions, starting with “Hail, Usekh-nemmt, who comest forth from Anu, I have not committed sin.”

During this post-death ritual (or living initiation) Ma’at balances the heart on her cosmic scales. Only a heart ‘light as a feather’ can pass through and ascend into the heavenly realms. For everyone else, they are delivered down into the depths of hell, forsaken of their soul. The deity presiding over this is Ammut, known as a ‘demon goddess’ (as they do).

Now, you might already be seeing the Catholic confession box here, with its penitent, confessing to the priest. Hold that thought.

These rituals might seem archaic to the modern world, but these templates are still etched into our hearts, along with all the missing pieces. Because this ritual, originally part of the feminine grief mysteries, designed to guide us between the worlds, can transform into a sinner, a penitent, a whore who has to be judged and then cleansed of demons (hello Mary Magdalene). It is fearful, contracting, it dries the tears up, it makes the grief wither and retreat, back to the dark pits where it must mourn in silence.

So let’s strip this scene back to the basics, we have a Lady of the Swan Wings, a heavenly siren, and a Lady of the Claw Feet, a denizen of hell, Ammut, a feminine energy presented as a beast, a devourer of souls, the goddess we don’t want to meet.

The weighing of the heart by Ma'at is originally a Grief ritual, a feminine funerary rite. Ma'at represented the Cosmic Womb (vulture/swan), and Ammut was the Earth Womb goddess. Both names Ma'at and Ammut (and Mut) mean Mother. In masculine paradigm this ritual was turned into a 'purity' ritual, to discern how sinful or guilty one had been, paving the way for the Christian ‘hell' (which no one wanted to pass through), and thus demonizing the womb of earth, the great deep feminine darkness, who has the power to 'eat our grief' so that we can have a good death, descend to the center of earth, and pass through into the cosmos.

This is mythical, magical, multi-dimensional healing work. At its root, these funerary and grief rites, ceremonialized the knowing that trauma, grief, burdens on the soul/heart affects the soul’s ability to resurrect or rebirth, as Elder cultures recognized that it was hard to move into a new dimension if there was a lot of trauma and the heart was heavy with grief. In the Mother rites, this was a grief ritual where the Earth Mother ate the burdens and sorrows that made the heart heavy (which became sin eaters later on).

When these rites are lost or only half-remembered, the stakes are unfathomably high. Death herself is trapped, like a fluttering bird, in a sinkhole.

The ancient feminine magicians understood that the gateways between the worlds had to be guarded, with craft and ceremony.

Judgment meant discerning or to 'see' – it was clarity and truth not as a punishment but as a wonderous gnosis of revelation.

Something about this ceremony of Ma’at is calling to us for a deeper remembrance. Firstly, we step back, scan the terrain and focus in on the major clue – we are in the hall of the ‘Two Ma'ats’ or the ‘Two Truths’, where the origin of these two intentional word plays is the name Mother - one being the Underworld Mother (Dragon/Earth) and one being the Cosmic Mother (Swan/Virgin). They have cognates in all the other Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. In Aramaic ama is Mother, in Hebrew imma, mater in Latin, ma in India. These words are called linguistically 'babble' words, that children make (ma and mu) to call for their mother.

We are calling to the Mother, and she is there for us, in all her forms, to answer that call and be our soul doula and guide.

Although it has been obscured, there are two mothers that we meet at death, or initiation, within The Hall of the Two Truths.

One is a human truth of your life, with sorrow, grief, trauma, resentments, shame, guilt, pain, suffering….to be released.

One is a soul truth of your life, with magic, love, courage, lightness, joy, glamour, destiny, forgiveness…to be realized.

They are both present, and we do not have to choose between them, or ‘ascend’ out of the truth of our sorrows. We can grieve.

Yes, the very advanced initiates may have 'eaten all their grief' before death (as part of a feminine path of weaving grief, feeling, releasing), but most people haven't gotten to that stage, and they need a hand from the Great Mother. This is the path down into the womb of earth, to give this grief to Mother, who will 'devour it' so that you can rebirth in the Womb of Love.

Underworld Serpents, Crocodiles, Hippos, Lions

Ma'at, and also Isis, were celestial psychopomps. Ma'at has a white ostrich feather in her headdress, representing lightness in one's energy body, and in one's spirit, and in one's heart. She is depicted with the black wings of the vulture, a traditional celestial psychopomp in the world of the ancient near east, where "sky burial" was sometimes practiced. A bird associated with Isis was the white goose. The dove was Mother Mary, the maternal celestial "intercessor" who could usher people into heaven independently of Jesus. Nephthys was a twin of Isis, the underworld aspect of Isis, similar to Ereshkigal and Inanna.

Ammut and Isis’s dark twin, Nephthys, were underworld or netherworld psychopomps. They were associated with earth, gravity, heaviness, watery realms, darkness, scorpio. Their totem animals were hippopotamuses, crocodiles, water creatures, mud dwellers.

In the ritual of Ma’at, what we must remember is that we first descend to Ammut’s realm for grieving and holding, before we are ready to meet Ma’at and have those swan fathers brush our hearts with their lightness and celestial magic of resurrection.

Ammut is not a ‘demon’ she is an eco-mother, a soul familiar of the Great Mother in her earthly, embodied form. Taweret, the ancient hippo deity, was Ammut's root. She was the goddess of fertility, birth, sensuality and earth magic. Ammut’s name (am, “swallow”; mut, “mother”, “goddess”) also incorporates “Mut”. Mut is a mother goddess in Egypt, representing primordial creative darkness, the original ocean of energy, and was married to the Sun, Amun-Ra. Mut's child was Khonsu—the moon—and was interchangeable with Ammut, as the devourer of the heart, the soul, the grief, in the Ma’at ceremonies.

The symbology of Mut is also closely connected to Ma'at—they both have vulture wings, the sacred bird that midwifed the souls of the dead. Isis was also depicted with black wings (the black falcon), and with a vulture headdress.

This lineage of dark, fertile goddesses who presided over birth, creation and resurrection were the Earth Womb / Watery Void counterpart to the celestial goddess Ma'at -- the muddy roots that birthed the Egyptian lotus. The dark womb power of khem.

Ammut was depicted as a combination of crocodile, hippopotamus and lion, beasts that all had the power to kill or "eat" humans—the symbolic digesting and dissolving of our pain bodies in the underworld, in preparation for rebirth. Ammut's role parallels the Biblical story of Jonah's forty days in the dark belly of the "whale" (actually a sea serpent) before his spiritual rebirth, and Jason the Argonaut's rebirth through the belly of sea serpent at the feet of Athena.

Ammut was a continuation of two more ancient Egyptian goddess streams—Taweret, the fearsome hippo-lion-crocodile goddess, guardian of birth and fertility, whose name meant "Great One". She was also called the "Lady of Heaven" and "Mistress of the Pure Waters". Her amulets date back before the formation of the Egyptian religion (before 3000 BCE). And, also Waset, "Great Female One", who later became Mut, the primordial mother goddess, whose name is incorporated into Am-mut's.

Tawaret was feared but revered as the ‘Lady of the Birth House’, who protected mothers and children, but the side of her that presided over death was cut off, separated, demoted and demonized.

Also known as a devourer of the soul in the funerary rites/rebirth rituals, is the great serpent of the underworld, Apep. This is mentioned in the Coffin Texts and The Book of the Dead (the Journey of Ani). The sun has to go through the same journey every night to be reborn in the morning—to return to the womb of the mother, the Duat, the night underworld. And, it’s easy to get stuck and not find your way through, especially if there is grief and trauma that hasn't been processed, or lost lineage maps.  

Disconnected from the Planetary Mother Placenta

In the era of sun worship (veneration of the light) these ideas were inverted, and the journey of feminine spirituality and grief ritual (presided over by women) were demonized. The ancient death rites of the Mother were turned into judgment for sin and guilt, and a turning away or fearing this benevolent dark womb of creation that could help process the grief and renew the soul. The outcome was a closing of the passageway between the worlds, a hiding of the organic light, behind a wall of separation.

As the passage below explains, this led to souls being funneled into an “AI heaven”, you might call it, where in a state of fear and guilt and unprocessed grief, they are ushered into a “false light” paradigm, dissociated from the feminine realms, from feelings, body soul, earth, lineage, from the Great Mother. A cutting of the heart from the soft, warm, beating heart of the love mystery.

“Somehow, an alien, antilife energy began embedding itself into the collective consciousness of humanity, separating us, and gradually undermining our placental connection to the true Gaian and cosmic womb grids. We find ourselves cut off from our roots, separated from the mother consciousness. From this place of disorientation and disconnection, we have been tricked into seeking our safety and nourishment from a false womb, a toxic man-made placenta—the artificial matrix of modern civilization that is on the brink of destroying our Mother Earth.”  

In an interview last year, I described the uncanny notion that, looking at the old gnostic texts, it seems like a disembodied artificial intelligence has been roaming the earth for over 5,000 years, at least, slowly and surely creating the conditions to birth its own tech-body to house it, and truly rule the world. This false god was described as jealous of the creative power of the feminine, because it could not think or birth its own unique ideas and energies, and could only copy and replicate the images of the Sophia.

Egyptian myth also tells a story that repeats this pattern of the theft of feminine wisdom by a jealous, lesser, male god/deity.

“In the old days of Egypt, Wadjet, the Eye of the Goddess, was both the sun and the moon. One day the god Atum realized that he had lost his children, and they had wandered into the darkness of the underworld. The Eye Goddess went down to retrieve them, shining her light into the dark abyss, birthing the light of the first dawn.

When she returned, rather than being praised and honored, she was shocked to find that Atum had discarded her, and replaced her instead with an artificial new masculine eye in an attempt to bring himself glory. In a fury she exiled herself to the wild deserts and, like Lilith of Mesopotamian myth, became “The Distant Goddess” or the lost feminine goddess. Humanity is born from her tears of grief and anger.

Quickly, the sun god Atum becomes vulnerable and “blind” without his feminine eye. He realizes he cannot live without her and pleads for her return. She eventually agrees, and he reinstates her on his forehead as the Ureaus serpent of feminine vision and power.”

Back to Ma’at, we can see how this ritual is now described as running dangerously parallel to Christian sin/hellfire theology.

“After the declarations are recited, their heart is weighed. If the heart weighed less than the feather of Ma'at, the deceased was ruled to be pure. Thoth recorded the result and Osiris would allow the deceased to continue their voyage toward Aaru and immortality. If the heart was heavier than the feather of Ma'at, the deceased was deemed impure. [Ammut] would devour their heart, leaving the deceased without a soul. Ancient Egyptians believed the soul would become restless forever, dying a second death. Instead of living in Aaru, the soulless individual would be stuck in Duat.”

In reality, the soul who is forced to confess sins and identify only with the light, is the person stuck in substrata of shadow realms with a heavy heart that cannot grieve, repent and meet the light from an embodied, grounded, place. What we see is a common pattern of the how the dark and red menstrual/death aspects of the life cycle (and the goddesses who represent it) and the release of grief and unwanted energy are cut out or made into demons. There is a role for the Womb Goddess in her light or conceptual phase, as a mother of life, but her role in death and menstruation—which is what renews and restores fertility—was cut out.

It is easy to see how the darkened confession box of the Catholic tradition borrows from this ancient feminine rite. But like the later Egyptian masculine traditions, it is a now a man presiding over the rites, asking to confess your sins and your guilt, in order to get through the pearly gates of heaven, rather than a Grief Priestess, holding your heavy heart with tenderness and love, weeping with you, and ushering you down into the dark fertility of the Womb of earth in order to release your sorrows and rebirth.

We lost our Grief Mother. We lost our ability to Keen, the cry of the womb that rebirths the world. We forgot our sacred duality.

This primal feminine magic was untamed. The realms of chaos, feminine creation magic (and death and rebirth magic) was dangerous, liminal, chaotic. You had to have your cunning, your wisdom, and, more than anything, a guide. All the texts spoke of needing to have a guide to navigate this realm and walk the pathways of descent, so you could also return to the light. What is highlighted in the Ma’at story is the knowing that souls could get stuck in the deep, if they didn’t grieve. The ancient traditions of the bardo in Tibet are parallel. As are the Mary's going to Jesus's tomb as the sun is rising and greeting him as he is resurrected.

Many of us know that the Egyptian rites were repackaged into the Christian mysteries, and we can feel the scent of the swan over Mary Magdalene, and like the sirens of old, when her robe falls to the side, we also see her claw feet, sunk deep into the earth.

She is famous in tradition for being the woman who ‘repented’, whispering to us of these rites of renewal. Reminding us to embrace the soil of the earth, and the truth of our lives, fully human, grief-soaked, yet also soaring back up to the light.

In the oldest understanding, repentance means “turning back to God”. It also implies a completed circuit and a “return to origin”, like when the last letter of the god-alphabet unites with the first. The last letter is the Malchut, the Shekinah, the Sophia: wisdom.

The mystics would choose to ‘fall’ like the goddess, only with the ascent back to God in mind. It was a pilgrimage of sorts– which later became the journey of Sophia in Gnostic tradition, when innocence becomes wisdom. When God is not something one is born into, but something one chooses, out of love and devotion. It was considered to be the highest love. Sophia’s Return.

This idea of ‘turning back’ is deeply feminine, also mirrored in the moon and menstruation, the moment when the cycle turns to renew itself, and the love returns, and the light is recovered, and the depth of grief has opened the heart into true compassion.

Grief is always a ‘turn back’, as our tears fall down to earth (they never rise) and we become part of the cycles of fertility. Cycles complete as new cycles birth.