Ancient Egyptian Kiss and the Sleeping Beauty

This post is also available in: French

There is one thing that one does not usually say about the kiss and the embrace, and yet the Ancient Egyptians knew it and used it in total awareness . That is why, today, I will tell you about the Ancient Egyptian kiss and by extension: the Sleeping Beauty. Curious topic you will tell me, but in fact of great importance as you will discover in this article.As we are obliged to live in an imposed earthly Time and with our limited biology, that prevents us from direct and quick access to a veiled past, as mysterious as it is rich, which is however ours, and to have a fair understanding of the things we think to know by heart, like the kiss, for example.

Edward Frederick Brewtnall [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons the sleeping beauty

On this topic we know today: that yes, the kiss lowers the blood pressure and slow the heart rate by releasing the hormone oxytocin and also acts on the secretion of endorphin. It is also known that kissing “lifts” the face and therefore rejuvenates it because then one activates at least the 12 muscles of the lips, not counting the 19 of the tongue. On the other hand, it is known that a kiss of 5 mn would be equivalent to the same caloric expenditure that if you run a 500 m and therefore it makes to lose weight. We also know from very serious studies by the American Association for the Promotion of Science (AAAS) in Chicago and by professors of neuroscience at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, that the kiss would make us more in love,  by allowing us to evaluate the partner, in short: that the oxytocynes create an attachment to the other. Okay, okay! But I and the Ancient Egyptians, we are telling   that the real benefits of the kiss (apart from the pleasure one takes to it) are absolutely not there! 

Likewise for the emblematic kiss of the Sleeping Beauty: we are told along psychological and psychoanalytical long studies about the two existing versions of the tale: the one of Charles Perrault and that of the brothers Grimm, that the Sleeping Beauty and the Prince who woke up  her by his famous kiss, speaks to us of: “awakening of sexuality” in the teenagers or, in the best of the cases: that a long period of rest can lead to great achievements! (Including babies ...). Well, well that tells us a lot! As if all this wonderful tale was only about that! As if we needed all the long and complex construction of this tale (I encourage you to read it again because only few people  know the full long version), to understand such simple things! In fact if it  speaks to us of the replacement of the lunar year(13fairies=13 months) by the solar year (only 12 invited=12months), it speaks also to us, at another level, of  the awakening to several types of knowledge which is not done without great danger but which brings a total realization of life. There is indeed, in our time, a notorious obsession to link everything to sexuality but the sexual or friendly kiss is only the common and trivial form of this action … But then, what can know the Ancient Egyptians about the kiss, that we do not know or no more?

Sesostris I being Embraced by God Ptah, relief from the Temple of Amun, Karnak (limestone) ; Egyptian 12th Dynasty (1991-1786 BC)

In fact, for the Ancient Egyptians the kiss concealed the most important thing for humanity: the life force in all its splendor and the awakening to knowledge, truth and reality. The kiss by the breath gives the fluid of life: it revives and restores us to our divine part that which is always connected to the sky and to our immortality. It is the fluid of life and its protection: the SA, the invisible force of the fluid of life (S3 n (c) nh) of which the Ancient Egyptians speak about on each of their monuments. It is hugging, mouth to mouth, with the breaths mixed, and touching with the palm of the hand along the neck of the other one, that one can “animate” someone. This person will be then: renewed in his energy of life, and will be “animated” (di c nh). Not only for physical health but also for spiritual health, healing at all levels, generating a total harmonization of the being. because the energy of cosmic life passes through our breaths. In the kiss for the Ancient Egyptians, it is the most important: these mixed breaths are: “a gift of life”, a gift of the universal vital fluid: the Sa which is a sacred protection, magic for its origin.

The egyptian SA

Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep 2400 B.C,Sakkara

This re-energizing life fluid is the life force itself, i.e., a mixture of: ANKH and KA and is at the origin of all Egyptian worship and philosophy. Everywhere on the obelisks, the facades of the temples,  this word is shown: “animated by the vital fluid”, by the kiss of life, because something of importance: objects also can be charged with this fluid of life, once kissed. Thus, when Pharaoh embraces an object, it impregnates it with his fluid of life by his breath. Kissing objects makes them exist on a sacred plane. Living beings “can impregnate”, as the great philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, what surrounds them. There is an  interaction of force fields. It is Aristotle who said “I call matter the first substrate” (hupokeimenon) and “Matter is the substratum of change”. The Sufis in Egypt explains that the cosmic breath is an electric current which passes through the circuit of our body.
And we see on a pillar of Karnak the god Ptah embracing Sesostris I: it transmits to him the fluid of life. For of course, the more this fluid comes from a pure being and powerful in energy, the more it has the ability to revive you.  For me, this exchange of breaths by the kiss, is also a corollary of the famous and very long funeral ceremony of “opening of the mouth” which allowed to keep its vital functions to the deceased or rather: restore his five senses for the Beyond and which was also practiced on statues. For any action on our Earthly plane, immediately you get the same effect in the other world, therefrom the need for the ancient Egyptians to practice simulacra and parodies of things, or even true things on Earth, to make it exist in heaven, especially for their dead . They followed literally the famous phrase found later in the  Emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus and many Arabic manuscripts of the 6th century, then in Latin and French, but its origin going back to Thot in Egypt: “That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.”

The Godess Amesemi and Candace Amanishakheto of Sudan

There is still not a lot of representation of this kiss, apart from the one of Sesostris 1st with Ptah, that of: Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, 2400 BC, on the wall of their tomb next to their wives and dozens of children but which made speculate on their sexuality, and the kiss of Queen Candace of Sudan with the goddess Amesemi where we see small Ankhs coming out of the mouth of the goddess, but soon others surely will see the day  because  there is still so much to excavate and discover.
The SA symbolized “the protection of young life” and for some, it originally depicted a rich crop, representing a bundle of bound papyrus , but earlier the SA loop represented , the mouth of a a fish “giving birth to fertile water “and by extension, life throughout the country.

The Ancient Egyptian kiss of which we are speaking here, is done in three steps: the hugg  or more exactly: a hand at the fold of the elbow of the other one, then the palm of the hand on the neck of the one you revivify and finally: the mouth-to-mouth kiss. The fact of giving an embrace before the kiss itself seems important: at the time of the Creation of the world: Atoum hugs Shou and Tefnout to transmit his Ka, his divine double, his fluid of divine life. “Embrace the king, (…) so that the Ka remains there forever” says the Text of the Pyramids.
Ancient Egyptians, alike other ancient civilizations, knew well that the breath in its vital dimension is the one that truly nourishes us. And the kiss was then: a receptacle for this exchange of breaths, where the life force of the two people strengthens both. And this of course reminds us of the Prana which in Sanskrit is: the breath, and therefore, the pranayama which is in the Kaushitaki-Upanishad, third Adhyaya: “The extension of the life force, the breath of life”. And we find the same thing in the Sufi teachings that persist today in Egypt: “Life is the Breath, the Breath is Life, Immortality is the Breath, the Breath is Immortality. Get immortality in other Worlds and Dimensions. “
So don’t forget after reading all this, that the lesson is: You must kiss more !

Antoine Gigal

 Texte, Photos & collage ©AntoineGigal-2016-Copyright©2016 -All rights reserved

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Bibliography:

-The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day. Translation by Ogden Goelet and Raymond Faulkner; San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 1994.

-Jean-Claude Goyon, Rituels funéraires de l'ancienne Égypte, Paris, CERF, 8 janvier 1997

-Teilhard de Chardin, Le phénomène humaine, 1955 in Debussy, Lecointre, Silberstein, Les matérialismes (et leur détracteurs), Syllepse, 2004

-Michel Blay, Dictionnaire des concepts philosophiques, Larousse, 2013, 880 p.

-Hazrat Inayat Khan,  The Sufi Teachings   http://hazrat-inayat-khan.org/php/views.php?h1=43&h2=4&h3=3

This post is also available in: French