It is Ptah who is the prototype for the Semitic, "Abrahamic", lonely and degraded concept called God or Allah.  All of the neteroo are but aspects of Ptah, who transcends space-time yet can manifest in any form in any time or place, with sublime subtlety or astounding force.

That which transcends space-time cannot be said to exist, cannot be said to Be. The Idea of Ptah represents the ultimate Divinity, including all series of opposites and having both manifest and non-manifest aspects.  Out of what was self-aware but non-manifest, without motion, formless, timeless, nameless and beyond mortal comprehension was brought forth form and time —- matter and motion, energy and space, humans, the heavens, the stars, the sun, the moon, minerals, fire, water, air, earth, animals, vegetation, thee and me, and all that Is, all that has Being.

Modern, post-Einstein physics posits that the Universe is composed of four forces or archetypal principles:  electromagnetism, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces.  Einstein could not and his successors have yet been unable to formulate a Unified Field Theory to unite these four into one, yet this is the ultimate goal of 21st Century physicists. The Egyptian Idea of the neteroo similarly created a philosophic system that posited that the primordial forces that govern all matter can be unified as One.

Through language and pictographs, emotion and intellect, sense and dialectic, geometry and analogue, parables and myths, the teachers of Ptah sought to simplify these complex teachings so that all the people could attain an Intuitive Transformation into Awareness of the Illumination of the Universal Energies. They taught about the laws and principles that govern life, how to discover and apply this sacred knowledge in their lives and pass it on to their children and their children’s children through the spoken Word, song, stories, papyrus scrolls, art, architecture, and all other possible media, signs, forms, substances, sacrements, rituals, performances, presentations, representations, replications, abstractions, syntheses, arts and sciences, etcetera. 

"Intuition ... is absolute knowledge founded on

the identity of the mind with the object(s) known."  Plotinus

 

"To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,

to raise the genius and to mend the heart.

To make mankind in conscious virtue bold

live o'er each scene and be what they behold." 

Pope

A UNIVERSE OF ENERGY

These neteroo “spirits” are portrayed for human understanding by pictographs and hieroglyphs of a multitude of human and animal forms known to all; known natures to help describe abstract and mostly invisible realms of existence. These aspects of being  are the obvious arrays of energetic forces that construe and rule our lives but are elusive to our normal consciousness. 

That is to say, although known by human and animal forms and attributes, these markings of language were but the signs and symbols for Divine Concepts and were never considered to be real animal or human beings, or even historical persons. Over time, however, the personification of these concepts gave rise to the idea that they were indeed endowed with their own expressions of love, hatred and human passions of every description.  And, over time, real persons, such as Osiris and Imhotep were perceived as being neteroo, mortals who had transcended mortality to become divine forces of nature which are inherent and alive in the cultural memory of mankind.   

The original purpose of the images of the neteroo and their stories was to fix our attention, we Children of Light, on these scientific and philosophical attributions, powers and realms [including our conscious (in-awareness) and sub-conscious (out-of-awareness) minds] that are characteristic of life on Earth and critical for the natural functioning of the Cosmos and our lives within it.

These neteroo and their realms are "living energies that contain ideas and information, specific patterns of instinctual behavior and thought. They are the energies that somehow attach themselves, without our conscious awareness, to everything we meet in the world we call real. [They] are the life energies that pour out of each of us unceasingly night and day. . . influencing everyone in our lives and causing us to be influenced in return." (Edwin C. Steinbrecher, author of, The Inner Guide Meditation.) Even if shown to be sitting, the neteroo is understood to be always in action, never sleeping, forever creating the Cosmos in a never-ending process.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Each neter and netert has a specific or combination principle and/or function, plus a name that is an abstract description of that power: Their names are the symbols of such attributes/functions/ forces/energies and their hieroglyphs provide other description of these powers. The adoration of Isis, for instance, is communion with the mother principle, the cohesive power of the Life Energy; of Osiris, the resurrection principle; of Ra, the solar principle responsible for all creation on the Earth.  All of these are names of Ptah just as Bill Smith has many names representing his many roles, a name matched with the functions and the principles which govern each; husband, father, teacher, coach, farmer, citizen, thinker, writer, bowler, gardener, tool-builder, carpenter and so on and on, and even fool, representing man in his quintessential form, with no personality, ideas, functions or roles at all but only creative energy.

The hieroglyphs (sacred glyphs) use many symbols and devices to reveal the nature of each neteroo: dress, feathers, color, size, gestures, sacred objects (flail, scepter, staff, ankh, etc.), headdress, crowns and animal heads, other hieroglyphs, animals and plants, the position of the body, and sacred geometrics (e.g., circle, line, square, oviad, triangle, and cross). The most prolific symbols found in the art of ancient Egypt include the Ankh, equated with Life eternal and the cosmic consciousness that All is One and One is Many. Another common symbol is the Udjat Eye, a template of humanity sensuality and portal to the code for the transformation of consciousness. We shall see.