My Kemetic ancestors say: we are not like the patriarchy says we are. We are not the pharoahs immortal in their pyramids, their colonization, their desertification of our swamp gods; for we are people of the Nile bayou. We are swamp folk, our gods are swamp gods, our magic is African swamp magic. We have lived here forever, since ages before humanity left Africa and left us here. These are the gods we speak to; not desert gods, like the same Empire speaks now, of one upstart young Primary Sun God, the eye of the pyramid. But a boundless world of ancient swamp gods! A million upon million gods, fetid and fertile, mother gods whom guided the birth of humanity going back to when humanoids were perhaps several species and we as so-called *Homo sapiens* but one of them. Our gods are shapeshifters, the moon is more real than you know. You forget so quickly that the Nile’s mouth was the greatest wetland in humanity’s history, and within its soil of boundless miracles lay most of our species, prosperous and whole, perhaps since we have all been human. Here, is humanity’s infancy: at the Nile’s breast. (Now near dry.) We have been here so long, we are the ancestors of everyone alive today; everyone.
To wander the desert a slave among the pharoahs was an exile; such was the story, millennia before the Bible was written — perhaps since the advent of writing, and pharoahs. Thus was the jackal forced into the desert, for their tricks, and is one of the few creatures who thrives in both habitats, shapeshifter, sneaksneak; thus did Anubis (Anpu-the-Marabu) wander to their death and rebirth three times in the desert before bringing forgiveness to their people, in the form of a scale and Ma’at’s feather; hint, we are all bodhisattvas, and thus do our hearts always weigh even. Thus do Anubis and Thoth together have their own story of sin and forgiveness, rather long and long before Jesus. It isn’t that one of these stories is wrong and one is right, or one is first and one is past; it is just that it is so endlessly mirrored across universal scales, you can find it among the modern Inuit and hints in pre-Vedic art, and if you’re taking my word for it, among birds and trees. Forgiveness, as inherent to the balance of a just Universe and existence itself, seems to be terribly important to humanity, gods, and certainly Mother Earth, though shall we call her the undammed Nile, or undamned. Stories seem to take similar shapes among cultures and soils the same.
I dreamed the story, more than once, my own in their own times and places, and have bits and pieces of them back and clear again. I mean to write them as fiction, someday. Anbu the jackal-man speaks to me in dreams; his story is super gay and so very deeply fucked up. But then that’s most of my dreams for you. The other fellow is Toth of the quill, and the mirror shatters; for Toth is… ha, I hope someday, to have the time to write their dream I dreamt, when I was 23 and contemplating suicide. (Some dreams have saved me.) Swamp and desert. Sphere and pyramid. An animate world and a patriarchal God. The wildfolk and the Empire — you know that story, right?
That one, being told right now? I wish I had time. I’m too busy trying to write my own story, which too, surely must be about forgiveness. It always does seem to start there, right along with changeling bringing fire; for changeling, as we ourselves, must be forgiven first, for being the spark.
I don’t know the end, yet, to any of these stories. Yet I catch glimpses, sometimes. “What’s the difference between a comedy and a tragedy?” asks my father in my head. I roll my eyes; I’ve heard this joke before.
“Which part of the story you choose to stop telling it at. It goes on forever.”
