1. Ramses II at British Museum, London 2. OG Ramses Thug, Portorro marble by Léo Caillard  (2020) 3. Horus by Revelations Museum 4. A limestone relief depicts Ramses II smiting his enemies 5. Shabti of Ramses II at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum

RAMESSES THE GREAT, aka:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

by Percy Bysshe Shelley, featured in Cracks by Jordan Scott (2009)

HORUS

Osiris is represented in the legend as the benefactor of humanity under whose wise guidance Hermes or Thoth gave the Egyptians their ancient culture. Osiris had an enemy, for whom the Greek name was Typhon. Typhon pursued Osiris, killed him, dismembered the body, hid it in a coffin and threw it into the sea. Issus, the sister and spouse of Osiris, sought unceasingly for him who had been torn from her by Typhon or Seth, and when at length she found the fragments of his dismembered body, she buried them in different places in the land where Temples were then erected. Then, after the death of Osiris, Issus gave birth to Horus. A spiritual ray descended upon Issus from Osiris, who had meanwhile passed into another world. The mission of Horus was to conquer Typhon and, in a certain sense, to re-establish the dominion of a life, which, proceeding from Osiris himself, was again to stream into mankind. … Let us try to conceive what the names of Osiris and Issus conveyed to the ancient Egyptian. He said to himself: “Behind man there is a higher spiritual essence, which does not proceed from his material existence. This spiritual essence has ‘condensed' into material, human existence. The real evolution of man has proceeded from a more spiritual existence. When I look into my own soul I realize that I have a longing for the Spiritual, a yearning towards the spiritual wellsprings of being from which I myself have descended. The forces from which I came forth are still living within me. My highest powers are inwardly related to these primordial Osiris- powers within me, bearing witness that I was once a super-sensible being dwelling in other worlds, in worlds of Spirit. And although this being of Spirit has but a dim and instinctive life, although it had perforce to be clothed with the physical body and its organs in order to perceive the physical world, yet in days gone by this being lived a purely spiritual existence.” … According to the ancient Egyptian conception, human evolution must be regarded as a duality, consisting of the Osiris-forces and the Isis-forces. “Osiris-Isis” — this was the duality. . . They said: “The super-sensible power of Osiris may be envisaged as the active power of light proceeding from the Sun, living and moving through space. Isis may be seen in the sunlight reflected by the dark Moon — just as the soul is dark when the active principle of thought does not enter. The Moon awaits the light of the Sun in order to reflect it, even as the soul awaits the Osiris-Power to reflect it back as Isis-Power.” … The Osiris-power living in man is fettered by Typhon — fettered within a form that is the “coffin” of the spiritual nature of man. Into this coffin the Osiris-nature in man disappears and is invisible to the outer world. The mysterious Isis-nature remains, in order that in future ages, after it has been permeated by the power of the intellect, it may again reach the well-springs of man's being. … And according to every true thinker, this higher Ego is there, deeply concealed in all the powers of man. This being — who is not the outer physical man but the man who has an unceasing urge to rise to the light of spirit, who is ever impelled by the hidden Isis-forces — appears as the earthly son of One who did not arise in the earthly world. He is the earthly son of Osiris who remained in the spiritual worlds. This invisible being — the being who strives to reach the Higher Self, was known by the name of Horus, the posthumous son of Osiris.

Leo Caillard’s timeless classical statues

The material is white Carrara marble, the appearance is that of the statues that decorated Greek and Roman temples, but the suggestion is that of works that do not belong to an ancient era, but to a way of the future, imagined by the artist Leo Caillard. The Wave Stone series tells of our relationship with time and the difficulty of defining its boundaries, both in everyday life and in art. The uncertainty towards the passage of time typical of our age is rendered by the Paris-based artist through the deformation of stone into waves that make the hard material fluid.

Leo Caillard – "Hipster in Stone"