Origin 1970 to 1988
Kemeticism is the modern reconstruction of ancient Egyptian religion, named from Kemet, the black land, which is what the Egyptians called their own country. It is not the ancient religion, which this atlas covers separately and which ended with the closing of the temples; it is a twentieth-century attempt to rebuild a practice out of Egyptological scholarship, surviving hymns and ritual texts, and the archaeological record. Kemetics honour Netjer, the divine, in its many named gods, keep shrines at which offering and libation are made daily on the pattern of the temple cult, and take maat, the right order of things, as the governing ethical idea. Practice is household rather than temple-based, and practitioners live overwhelmingly in North America and Europe rather than in Egypt, whose population is Muslim and Christian and has no continuity with the ancient cult.
History & Origin
Modern Kemeticism reconstructs the polytheistic religion of ancient Egypt for contemporary practitioners, drawing on Egyptological scholarship and primary Egyptian texts while adapting them to a living devotional practice.
Facts
History
Era of Modern Revival Status
Current StatusSourced to the subject's own accountKemeticism today comprises multiple independent organizations and unaffiliated practitioners rather than one central body; Kemetic Orthodoxy remains its largest and most structured tradition. 2 Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Status TodayRevived or reconstructed in the modern era 1 Legal StatusSourced to the subject's own accountTamara Siuda's House of Netjer, the seminary and church of Kemetic Orthodoxy, is registered with the United States Internal Revenue Service as a tax exempt 501(c)(3) religious organization, giving it formal legal standing distinct from the many smaller, informally organized Kemetic groups. 2 Identity
Also Known As Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodKemetic revivalist and reconstructionist groups begin appearing in the United States from the 1970s; Tamara Siuda's Kemetic Orthodoxy, founded in 1988, became the largest and most institutionally developed of them. 1 Place of OriginThe United States and Europe 1 FounderOther Kemetic bodies have other origins 1 FounderTamara Siuda, who founded Kemetic Orthodoxy in 1988 1 Belief
TheologyPolytheistic: many gods 1 Restoration ClaimSourced to the subject's own accountAdherents describe Kemeticism as continuing the religion of ancient Egypt; scholars class it as a modern reconstruction, since public worship of the old gods ended with the closure of Egypt's last active temple at Philae in the sixth century, over a thousand years before the movement's twentieth century revival. 2 Practice
Practice StatusLiving, and in active revival 3 Sourced to the subject's own accountKemeticism as a broad revival movement publishes its teaching material and welcomes newcomers; individual organized lines within it, such as Kemetic Orthodoxy, hold their own initiatory procedures closed, recorded separately on that organization's own entity. Learn More
The Ancient Religion and the Modern One
The atlas carries an entry for ancient Egyptian religion and an entry for Kemeticism, and they are not two accounts of one thing.
Ancient Egyptian religion was a state cult with an economy attached. Its temples held land, its priesthoods were offices, and the daily service of washing, clothing and feeding the god's image was performed in a sealed sanctuary by professionals acting for the king. It ran for well over three thousand years, changed considerably across that time, and ended: the temples closed under Christian Roman rule, the last dated hieroglyphic inscription at Philae belongs to the fourth century, and the knowledge of how to read the script was lost until Champollion recovered it in 1822.
Kemeticism begins in the 1970s. It is a reconstruction, and the good practitioners are precise about what that word concedes:
- The sources are texts and archaeology, read through Egyptological scholarship, not a transmission from a teacher who received it from a teacher.
- Very large parts of the ancient practice cannot be reconstructed, because the record preserves what was written on stone in tombs and temples and preserves far less of what ordinary people did.
- The ancient cult was inseparable from Egyptian kingship and the Egyptian state, neither of which exists.
Where a group claims unbroken descent from antiquity, the claim is not demonstrable and there is no evidence for it. That is a statement about the historical record and not a judgement about the religion; Wicca has the same history and most Wiccans now say so without regarding it as a loss.
The harder question is about Egypt. The sources are Egyptian, the sites are in Egypt, and the practitioners are overwhelmingly not: modern Egypt is Muslim and Christian, and there is no living Egyptian community with a claim on these gods. Kemetics disagree among themselves about what follows from that, and about the related question of the Ausar Auset Society and the Pan-African reading of Egyptian religion, which approaches the same material from a quite different starting point.
Maat, and a Priesthood Without a Temple
What modern Kemetic practice has to work with is the opposite of the Heathen problem. The Egyptian material is enormous, continuous and largely written by practitioners. The difficulty is that it describes an institution that cannot be rebuilt.
The concept that holds it together
Maat is order, truth and right relation, personified as a goddess and represented by a feather. It is not a commandment set. It is the condition the cosmos is in when things are as they should be, and it was held to require continuous maintenance: by the king, by the rites, and by ordinary conduct. The negative confession of the Book of the Dead, in which the dead declare the wrongs they have not committed, is the closest thing the tradition has to an ethical list, and it is a declaration rather than a code.
A state cult with no state
Egyptian temple religion was performed by a professional priesthood, in closed sanctuaries, on behalf of a king who was himself a religious office. Ordinary people met it at festivals when the god was carried out, and had their own household practice besides. A modern practitioner can take up the household practice and the ethics with some confidence. The temple cult presupposes a functioning state and a king, and no reconstruction has solved that.
Two approaches
Reconstructionists work from the Egyptological literature and stay close to attested practice. Revivalist bodies, of which Kemetic Orthodoxy is the largest, accept modern revelation and an ordained leadership, and hold that the tradition can develop. Each regards the other's solution as the compromise. The atlas records both without ruling on which is continuous with the ancient religion, because that question is not settled by evidence alone.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Kemetic directly: "each rather than treating modern Kemetic practice as one movement; its limit is a Wikipedia community article rather than a new religious movements monograph, which is why it sits at reliability..."
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
The blessed dead are honoured at the household shrine alongside the gods in modern Kemetic practice.
The teaching of a named house within modern Kemeticism, not of the movement as a whole; independent Kemetics commonly reject it.
Kemeticism rebuilds practice from the Egyptological record, surviving hymns and ritual texts, and the archaeology.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
How Many People Practice Kemeticism?
Kemeticism has never been independently counted. No government census records religious affiliation at this level of detail, no recognized religious-statistics body has surveyed it, and its own reference literature, including its English-language Wikipedia treatment, states no membership figure of any kind. The 1994 United States federal recognition of Kemetic Orthodoxy as a tax-exempt religious organization established legal standing, not a headcount.
What would resolve this A dedicated survey of Kemetic practitioners conducted by a body independent of the movement's own clergy, or a government religious-affiliation census large enough to sample reconstructionist Egyptian religion as its own category rather than folding it into a broader Pagan or Other total.
Sociology of religion, religious demographyWikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, "Kemetism"
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