"The Opening of the Lion's Gate" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Complete Encyclopedia of Egyptian Deities"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 8
The Opening of the Lion's Gate
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to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)
Somewhere
around midnight tonight, millions of people across social media will post the
same image: a lion, a star, a stylized number 8 turned on its side into
infinity, captioned with some version of “the veil is thin, manifest big.” The
Lion's Gate Portal, they'll tell you, is an energetic doorway thousands of
years old, tracked by the ancient Egyptians themselves, opening precisely on
8/8 when Sirius aligns with the Sun in Leo. It's one of the most widely
repeated pieces of occult lore on the internet.
It's
also, in the specific form most people are sharing it, considerably younger
than believed…
The Gate Opens
The
term “Lion's Gate” traces to the American astrologer Ray Mardyks, who coined it
to describe the lunar eclipse of August 8th, 1988, the now-famous 8/8/88.
Mardyks was drawing on real astrological antecedents; Dane Rudhyar's 1936 book The Astrology of Personality
discusses the symbolic weight of the Sun's position in Leo in real depth, and
Alice Bailey's 1951 Esoteric Astrology
explores a Sirius-Leo connection at length. But the specific branding, the
phrase “Lion's Gate,” the annual August 8th observance, the modern ritual
language of manifestation and heart-chakra activation, all of that is a
late-twentieth-century synthesis, not an unbroken lineage stretching back to
the pharaohs.
_(Vall%C3%A9e_des_Rois,_Th%C3%A8bes_ouest)_-8.jpg)
However, what the ancient Egyptians actually tracked, and tracked with real astronomical sophistication, was something related but meaningfully different, and arguably more interesting than the modern portal built on top of it. The genuine ancient practice here is the heliacal rising of Sirius, the moment each year when the star, called Sopdet by the Egyptians and identified with the goddess Isis, first becomes visible again in the pre-dawn sky after a period of invisibility. Egyptian priests tracked this event with nilometers and temple alignments, most famously at the Temple of Isis at Dendera, because it reliably preceded the annual Nile flood by a matter of weeks, the single most important agricultural event in Egyptian civilization. Its return marked Wepet Renpet, the opening of the Egyptian new year.
Yet, that heliacal rising didn't occur on August 8th for the ancient Egyptians. Due to a quirk of the Egyptian civil calendar drifting against the true solar year, and independently, the extremely slow wobble of Earth's own axis known as precession, the astronomically calculated date of Sirius's heliacal rising at Memphis fell around July 17th to 19th for most of pharaonic history, from the Old Kingdom through the Roman period. It's only in our own era, roughly two thousand years and one full swing of that precessional “wobble” later, that the date has drifted forward to early August. The ancient Egyptians weren't watching for August 8th. We are, purely because the sky has shifted since their time, and the coincidence has been retroactively presented as their design.
None of which makes the underlying astronomy any less genuinely remarkable. The Sothic cycle, the 1,460-year period after which Sirius's heliacal rising and the Egyptian civil calendar's new year realign, remains one of the most impressive pieces of sustained naked-eye astronomy in the ancient world, and it really is the backbone of much of Egyptian chronology as historians understand it today.
To Infinity and Beyond!
The
rest of today's cluster of associations is a genuine grab bag, and it's worth
being honest about what's traditional and what's modern invention. The
numerological reading of 8/8, the sideways eight as infinity, the number's
associations with balance and abundance, is a real and long-practiced strand of
Western numerology, though its application to this specific date is, again, a
modern layer rather than an ancient one. Early August does sit close to Lammas or Lughnasadh, the
genuine cross-quarter pagan harvest festival most properly observed August 1st
or 2nd, so readers whose practice includes the Wheel of the Year aren't wrong
to feel late-summer, first-harvest energy in the air this week, even if the two
observances aren't formally the same holiday.
And
then there's Infinity Day, which deserves an honest note of its own. It's real,
but it is not ancient, hidden, or globally organized in the way it's sometimes
described. It was created in 1987 by Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo, a New York City
sidewalk philosopher known locally as the “Free Advice Man,” who chose August
8th for its infinity-symbol numerology
and used the date to hold peaceful demonstrations promoting philosophical
inquiry and free expression. It's a lovely, sincere, entirely modern novelty
observance founded by one specific, documented person, which is a different
thing entirely from a suppressed ancient tradition, and it deserves credit as
exactly that rather than vague mystical pedigree it doesn't actually have.
None of this myth-checking is an argument against marking the date. Setting an intention on a day that feels symbolically loaded is a perfectly legitimate piece of personal practice regardless of whether Ramesses II was doing the same thing, and the Sun's genuine passage through Leo, the real approach of Lammas, and the real astronomical beauty of Sirius climbing back into the pre-dawn sky are all worth honoring on their own terms. The only casualty of getting the history right is the marketing claim that you're tapping into something Cleopatra circled on her calendar. What you're actually tapping into is a strange, layered, thoroughly modern occult tradition built in 1988, standing on top of a genuinely ancient piece of astronomy that, this year, simply happens to land nearby.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the real deity behind the star everyone's talking about, we're recommending the definitive modern reference on who Sopdet actually was, and who she kept company with.
The Complete Encyclopedia of
Egyptian Deities
By
Tamara L. Siuda, PhD | Llewellyn Worldwide
Dr.
Tamara L. Siuda brings a genuinely rare combination of credentials to this
April 2024 release: she's both an academically trained Egyptologist and the
Nisut, or head, of the Kemetic Orthodox religious community, meaning this
encyclopedia is written by someone who studies these deities as historical
subjects and honors them as living devotional practice simultaneously. With a
foreword by Normandi Ellis, the book profiles more than one hundred Egyptian
gods, goddesses, and divine beings, Sopdet and Isis included, covering
personality, sacred forms and symbols, hieroglyphic names, associated
festivals, and worship centers, while also addressing how each deity is honored
by modern practitioners today.
What
distinguishes this encyclopedia from older, more academically dry references is
its genuine attention to continuity. Siuda doesn't treat Egyptian religion as a
sealed museum exhibit; entries consistently bridge ancient attestation with
contemporary devotional practice, making this as useful to a modern Kemetic
practitioner setting up a shrine as to a reader simply trying to understand who
Sopdet was before she became a hashtag. The book also reaches beyond the most
famous deities to include guest gods absorbed into the Egyptian pantheon from
Nubia, Libya, and the Levant, giving a fuller picture of just how cosmopolitan
Egyptian religious life actually was.
This
is a reference work, not a narrative history, and readers wanting a single
continuous story of Egyptian mythology may want to pair it with a more
traditional narrative text. But for anyone who spent today's post learning that
the star behind the Lion's Gate has an actual name, an actual goddess, and an
actual multi-thousand-year religious history considerably richer than an
Instagram caption, this is the single best place to go looking for her.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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