One Hundred and Fifty Five

I woke this morning with the words of Major Amberson echoing in my head.  They're actually the Major’s words as spoken by Orson Welles in his film of The Magnificent Ambersons, which so impressed me when I was a child that I read the novel on which it was based.

As he nears the end of his life, the Major becomes uncharacteristically philosophical.  He asks himself what happens to us when we die, and reasons that our souls return to wherever they came from.  The sun is the source of all life on earth, therefore our souls return to the sun.

I knew Tarkington’s novel won the Pulitzer Prize, but I found it inferior to the film.  The Major’s words sounded magnificent when spoken by Welles, but looked banal on the page.  This was perhaps the first time I became aware that a second-rate novel can inspire a great film.   

Now that I'm nearing the end of my own life, my thoughts seem to me as banal as the Major’s.

It’s obvious why the sun was our first god.  He rules the sky, and fertilizes mother earth with rain.  But before the gods there were goddesses.  And before them both, the void.

Egyptologists are puzzled by the fact that Nut was goddess of the sky and Geb, her brother/husband, god of the earth.  But Nut was goddess of the night sky.  The black void overhead was her body, and the stars that filled it were the souls of the dead.  Osiris climbed up a ladder to re-enter his mother’s body and become king of the dead.

The Book of Nut is the earliest known text on astrology and astronomy.  What we separate into religion and science is the study of the night from which we all woke and to which we all return.