Standing on the shore
Of a frozen sea with stagnant waves,
Every night the captain
Looks at the horizon
For his last lost ship.
Years passed, he aged.
The ship's name Hu King, denoting God himself,
Engraved in his arms, remains dark.
He searches for his lost love
In the city of his dreams.
Faces wearing glowing masks
Darken the city in sunshine.
Fooling with the other fools
His crystal eyes long for another's crystal eyes.
In which his
Despair, desolation, and dreams will sink.
In Sufism Hu (or Huwa) is the pronoun ("He") used with Allah: Allah Hu means "God, Just He!" Hu, as an intensive in Arabic added to Allah, means "God himself." The Islamic credo, "La Ilaha Ila Allah Hu" means "There is no God but Allah" (or "La Ilaha Ila Huwa," There is no god but He) or, in Sufi interpretation,"There is no reality except God." Toward the end of the Passover Seder, a fulfillment of the biblical commandment to each Jew to "tell your son" of the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus, Jews sing the hymn "Adir Hu" (Mighty is He), which lists the virtues of God in an alphabetic format (Aleph, Bet, Gimel, etc.), most of which are adjectives (for instance, Holy [Kadosh] is he); however, a few are nouns. (Lord is he). The tune has gone through many variations, but the earliest extant music was in the 1644 "Rittangel Hagada;" a second form was found in the 1677 "Hagada Zevach Pesach," and a third one, the closest to the modern one, in the 1769 "Selig Hagada."
ReplyDeleteThe Hellenistic culture established under the Ptolemies in Egypt (323-30 BCE) continued to thrive in Egypt throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods, until the Muslim conquest. During their rule, scholars tried to interpret ancient Egyptian religious concepts from a Greco-Roman perspective. Over time, the Egyptians had established multiple divine pantheons (pesedjets); the Pyramid Texts of the 5th and 6th dynasties (the end of the Old Kingdom, from ca. 2686–2181 BCE) mentioned the Great Pesedjet, the Lesser Pesedjet, the Dual Pesedjet, plural Pesedjets, and the Seven Pesedjets, and some pharaohs had established pesedjets that incorporated themselves among the deities (for instance, that of Menmaatre Seti I, who perhaps reigned from 1294 BCE to 1279 BCE, combined six important deities with three deified forms of himself). The Greeks identified a pantheon at Hermopolis Magna (Ḫmnw, Khemenu) as the Ogdoad ("the eightfold"), probably the primordial one in Egypt and already nearly forgotten by the time the Pyramid Texts were composed; the oldest surviving pictorial representations date to the time of Seti I. Texts of the Late Period (664-332 BCE) described the Ogdoad males as being frog-headed and the females as serpent-headed. They were arranged in four male-female pairs (the female names were derivative female forms of the male names), Nu and Nut (sky and water), Kekui and Kekuit (dusk and dawn), Qeth (or Amun) and Qierhet (or Amunet), apparently related to night or repose, and Hu (ḥw, "endlessness") and Hauehut, associated with a term for an undefined or unlimited number or perhaps personifications of the atmosphere between heaven and earth. Hu was sometimes depicted with a palm stem in one or both hands or in his hair, representing long life, with years depicted as notches; in that case, at the base of each palm stem he also had a shen ring, which represented infinity. Depictions of Huh used in hieroglyphs represented one million, essentially equivalent to infinity. At Aunu (Heliopolis), the Greeks called the Great Pesedjet the "Ennead" ("group of nine"): the self-begotten Atum spit, ejaculated, or castrated himself to create his children Shu (the air) and Tefnut (moisture), who begot Geb (earth) and Nut (the nighttime sky) -- separated by Shu from their continuous copulation -- who begot Osiris and his sister/consort Isis and Set and his sister/consort Nephthys). Upon this act of creation, Atum exclamed "Hu," which became deified. In the Pyramid Texts, Hu was a companion of the deceased pharaoh and depicted with Sia in the retinue of Thoth, with whom he was occasionally conflated. In the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2050-1800 BCE), when Osiris supplanted Atum as the most important deity in popular religion, all gods participated in Hu and Sia, who were associated with Ptah's creation of the universe by uttering the word of creation. Hu was depicted in human shape, as a falcon, or as a man with a ram's head. In the New Kingdom, which began ca. 1570–1544 BCE and lasted until 1802 BCE, Hu and Sia were members of the 14 creative powers of Amun-Ra. By the time of the Ptolemaic dynasty Hu had merged with Shu.
ReplyDeleteIn North America, the Hopi, Zuni, and other western Pueblo groups held dance rituals featuring the humming bird spirit being (kachina) Hú (Huhuwa or Tithu), who intervened on behalf of the people to convince the gods to bring rain.
ReplyDeleteHU is also a mantra popularized as a name for and love song to God in the Eckankar ("Co-worker with God") religion founded by Paul Twitchell (the mahanta Peddar Zaskqin) in 1965 to help individuals find their way back to God through direct personal spiritual experiences. It employs simple spiritual exercises, such as singing "Hu," its most basic practice, to expand awareness, offer solace in times of grief,bring peace and calm, experience the Light and Sound of God, and recognize the presence of ECK (the Holy Spirit, Audible Life Current, Life Force, derived from the Sikh concept of Ik Onkar). Eckankar developed from Hindu and Sikh traditions, as well as the egalitarian 13th-century Sant Mat poet-saints who practiced an inward devotion to a divine principle but ignored the Hindu caste proscriptions and the sectarian divisions between Hindus and Muslims. Their traditions were influenced by and continued to influence Sufi poets such as Shams-i-Tabrīzī and his protege Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi as well as Sindhi poets such as Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and Syed Muhammad Usman Marwandi (Lal Shahbaz Qalandar), and Sachal Sarmast ("truthful mystic'").