"Egyptian “All Souls’ Day”" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Circle of Isis: Ancient Egyptian Magic for Modern Witches"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 13
Egyptian “All Souls’ Day”
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Across
modern Pagan calendars, September 13th is frequently listed as an ancient
Egyptian holiday called the Ceremony of Lighting the Fire, an “All Souls' Day”
on which sacred flames were lit in temples across the Nile in honor of the dead
and of Nephthys, described as protectress of the dead and Queen of the
Underworld. It's a beautiful image, genuinely moving in its details, fire,
mourning, a goddess watching over the departed. It's also, as far as any
documented ancient Egyptian source can confirm, a holiday that doesn't actually
seem to exist, at least not in the form or on the date it's usually presented.
What
does exist, once you go looking for the real Egyptian material behind the
claim, turns out to be richer and considerably better documented than the
invented version…
Tracing
the “September 13 Ceremony of Lighting the Fire” claim backward leads, again
and again, to the same place: modern Pagan calendar compilations, Patricia
Telesco's popular 1998 reference 365 Goddess, various Wiccan community
calendars, and similar aggregator sites that have copied the entry from one
another for decades. None of them cite an ancient Egyptian primary source, a
dated papyrus, a temple inscription, or a peer-reviewed Egyptological reference
for this specific festival, on this specific date. That absence matters.
Genuine ancient Egyptian religious festivals are, as a rule, extremely well
documented, tracked against the Egyptian civil calendar with its twelve
thirty-day months and five extra epagomenal days, not a fixed date on the
Julian or Gregorian calendar the way this entry implies. A festival this
specific, with no ancient source behind it, bears all the hallmarks of a claim
invented or badly garbled sometime in the twentieth century and then copied
forward, calendar to calendar, without anyone checking the original.
However,
Egypt genuinely did hold festivals involving fire, light, and the dead, and Nephthys genuinely was a goddess deeply
associated with mourning and protection. The specific claim simply compresses
several real, separate traditions into a single invented date and misassigns
Nephthys a title that was never actually hers.
Start with the correction that matters most: Nephthys was never Egypt's “Queen of the Underworld.” That role, to the extent ancient Egyptian religion assigned it at all, belonged to Osiris himself, ruler of the Duat and judge of the dead. Nephthys's own name means “Mistress of the House,” and her real, richly documented role was as one of the “Two Kites,” paired eternally with her sister Isis as the twin mourner-goddesses who found, wept over, and helped restore the murdered Osiris. On a more practical, ritual level, Nephthys served as protector of Hapi, one of the Four Sons of Horus, whose canopic jar guarded the lungs of the mummified dead, a real, specific funerary duty attested across centuries of Egyptian burial practice.
Nephthys
did have a genuine, dated birthday in the Egyptian religious calendar, and it
connects directly to the same epagomenal days this magazine has covered before
in relation to her sister. The Egyptian civil calendar's five extra days,
appended to keep pace with the solar year, were traditionally understood as the
birthdays of five major deities in sequence: Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set,
Isis, and finally Nephthys on the fifth and final epagomenal day. That's a
real, calendrically anchored honor, just one that lands relative to the
Egyptian civil year rather than a fixed September date, and one shared with,
rather than separate from, her sister's own birthday the day before.
The genuine ancient ritual most likely echoed, however distantly, in the modern “ceremony” claim is the Festival Songs of Isis and Nephthys, a real liturgical text surviving on a papyrus now held in the British Museum, dated to roughly the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty or later. The text instructs that it be sung by two virgin priestesses standing in for the two goddesses themselves, performed annually as part of a five-day festival honoring Osiris's death and resurrection. The surviving verses are genuinely powerful, direct laments calling the slain god back to life, invoking exactly the themes of grief, protection, and restoration that the vague modern “ceremony” gestures toward without ever citing. This is the real Nephthys ritual tradition: textually documented, performed by named ritual participants, tied to Osiris's own mythic cycle rather than a generic “All Souls” observance.
The
fire and light imagery in the modern claim likely traces, however loosely, to a
genuinely documented Egyptian tradition as well. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century
BCE, described an actual annual Festival of Lights held at Sais, the city
sacred to the goddess Neith, during which
oil lamps were lit and left burning through the entire night, not just in the
temple but across ordinary Egyptian households throughout the country. Later
Egyptian tradition folded similar lamp-lighting practices into festivals
honoring Isis specifically, a genuine ritual of illumination this magazine has
already traced in an earlier post on the Roman-era Lychnapsia,
itself rooted in this same Egyptian light tradition, if calendared for a
different date and deity than what's popularly attached to Nephthys today.
None
of this scrutiny should read as dismissal of the impulse behind the modern
observance. Lighting a candle for the dead, invoking a goddess associated with
mourning and protection, honoring an ancient culture's relationship with grief,
these are sincere and worthwhile acts of devotion regardless of whether a
specific invented date has real Egyptological backing. What the record actually
supports is arguably richer than the compressed version in circulation: a
documented liturgical text where two goddesses sing a dead god back to life, a
real dated birthday shared between two divine sisters, and a genuine ancient
tradition of household and temple lamps burning through the night in a
completely different city, for a completely different goddess. The real Nephthys
deserves that fuller, more accurate story, mourner and protector in her own
documented right, rather than a borrowed title and an undated ceremony.
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 mourning goddesses at the heart of this story, we're recommending a modern practitioner's guide to their shared tradition.
Circle
of Isis: Ancient Egyptian Magic for Modern Witches
By
Ellen Cannon Reed | Red Wheel/Weiser
Originally
published as Invocation of the Gods before its expanded Weiser edition, Ellen
Cannon Reed's Circle of Isis builds a genuinely practical modern
devotional system around the Egyptian pantheon, Isis and Nephthys included,
grounded in real study of the mythology rather than borrowed, uncited festival
dates. Reed draws direct, explicit connections between documented ancient
sources and usable modern ritual structure, giving contemporary practitioners a
way to actually work with figures like Nephthys without relying on secondhand
internet calendar entries to do it.
The
book's real strength is its honesty about where scholarship ends and modern
reconstruction begins, treating the gap between documented ancient practice and
living contemporary devotion as something to name openly rather than paper
over, exactly the distinction today's post has tried to draw out in detail.This
is a devotional and ritual guide rather than an academic Egyptological text,
and readers wanting the deeper primary-source material, including the Festival
Songs of Isis and Nephthys itself, should pair it with a dedicated scholarly
translation. But for readers of this magazine wanting to build real, honest
modern practice around Nephthys and her sister, Reed's guide offers a
considerably more solid foundation than an invented September ceremony ever
could.
(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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