35: You purify (yourself), Horus purifies (himself),

You purify (yourself), Seth purifies (himself),

natron of the North, 5 pellets of Wadi Natrun

You purify (yourself), Thoth purifies (himself),

You purify (yourself), the god purifies (himself),

you make yourself also pure with what is amongst them,

(so that) your mouth is (like) the mouth of a milk calf on the day of its birth

36: You purify (yourself), Horus purifies (himself),

you purify (yourself), Seth purifies (himself),

You purify yourself

Natron, one pellet

Thoth purifies (himself), you purify (yourself),

The god purifies (himself)

You purify (yourself), your Ka purifies (himself),

You purify (yourself), purify, you purify (yourself).

This your own self purifies you among your brothers the gods.

You purify your mouth, you make pure all your bones, you are adorned with what is yours.

O Osiris, I give you the Eye of Horus that you may adorn your face with it. Hold on (to it)! [1]

[1] Utterances 35-36, North Wall- First Register. Sarcophagus Chamber, Pyramid of Unas.

The English word natron derives from the ancient Egyptian nṯrj ( v. to make divine) referring to the Wadi al-Natrun, a desert

depression west of the Nile delta- the origin source of natron (sodium, Na). The vast dried alkaline lakes of this valley supplied the

Egyptians with an inexhaustible natural source of sodium carbonate and sodium oxide. Used as an ultra-practical preservative of meat

and fish, taken further sincerely to preserve the body and soul for both the living and the dead into the afterlife. This same natron was

skillfully used in Egyptian glassmaking as flux, reconstructing silica atoms in a frozen purgatory between liquid and solid.

II. Millenia Before Edison

If light and fire embodied life and well-being, darkness was death and illness. In metallurgical terms flux is a flowing,

purifying agent. High-pressure sodium lamps (2200k) use sodium in an excited state to produce the brightest most efficient light

source commercially available today. Light in its purely industrialized form, unmitigated by a poor color rendering index rating of

22cri. An orange-black skyglow radiates from cities disrupting circadian rhythms in its path. Refracting as it obfuscates the cosmos,

the result is a loss. Severed from an ingrained connection to the stars an imperceptible depression on the collective physical and

psychological well-being is normalized. The neo god-light presence of the night anesthetizes.

The basic fact when the ancient conceptions of night and day are concerned is the role of light in the process of creation.

The eye of Rē rose out of a lotus flower that appeared on the surface of a watery chaos. The photographic process is reliant on this

fundamental solar theology. Directional reflectance exhibits a late kingdom artifact through the luminance of an obsolete safelight

fixture used to prevent orthochromatic materials from exposure. The djed is one of the oldest Egyptian religious symbols, most often associated

with rebirth and regeneration. The pillar shape is continuously misread by ill-advised fringe disciples for the observed

formal similarity to modern day high-voltage insulators. Alleged ancient advanced technological implications are further surmised in

the “electrothesis” [2] theory which insists on the djed’s active place in a specific set of hieroglyphs erroneously interpreted to depict a

prehistoric incandescent lightbulb.

III. “ And a lightning flash snapped across the sky though there were no clouds …” [3]

A god rose from heaven is a study of two incongruous glass specimens. Libyan desert glass is an impactite composed of

ejected, melted, and coalesced sand grains- the result of a comet detonating in the atmosphere 26 million years ago over the southwest

Egyptian desert near the border of Libya. A cosmic armageddon of heated and tortured silica, the heavens rained back to earth

shimmering yellow glass shards. Pleistocene man knapped tools from it, royal Egyptian artisans further appropriated it centrally in the

jewelry of kings. On July 16, 1945 5:29:45 am near Alamogordo, New Mexico the United States detonated the first atomic bomb. The

5-ton mechanism vaporized, mutating the desert silica beneath; swirling, melting and raining back down in radioactive green splashes.

A star shaped lake of glittering jade green glass within a seared disk of burnt vegetation was observed as an insignificant detail of the

test. Locals and tourists collected shards until the US atomic committee bulldozed the Trinity test site in 1953. It is no longer legal to

remove material from the site, however material that was taken prior to this prohibition remains in the hands of collectors.

[2] Das Licht der Pharaonen, Peter Krassa/Reinhard Habeck (Ullstein-Buch, 1996)

[3] The Ramayana, 5th century BCE. trans. William Buck (Berkely: The University of California Press, 1976) p.163