Ptah

Who Ptah actually is

Ptah (ptḥ — "the opener," or alternately "the sculptor") is the *creator-god of Memphis*, the ancient capital of Egypt and the *chief religious-political center* of the Old Kingdom. His theology — preserved most-completely in the *Memphite Theology* inscription on the *Shabaka Stone* (a Twenty-fifth-Dynasty basalt slab from c. 700 BCE, now in the British Museum, recording much-older Memphite theological material) — is the *most-radically-intellectual creation-myth in the ancient world*. Where the Heliopolitan cosmogony (Atum-Ra creating through masturbation, breath, and physical emanation) is fundamentally *bodily*, the Memphite Theology has Ptah creating the universe *by thought and speech alone*: "There came into being in the heart, there came into being on the tongue something in the image of Atum. Mighty and great is Ptah, who transmitted [life] to all gods, as well as their ka's, through this heart and through this tongue." Ptah's *heart* (the seat of thought in Egyptian psychology) conceives the form; his *tongue* (the organ of authoritative speech) commands the form into existence. *Every other god is a manifestation of Ptah's creative thought and speech*. This is the *Logos-theology* (creation-by-the-word) fifteen centuries before the Gospel of John ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God") — and the Egyptological consensus is that the Greek philosophical-theological tradition that fed into Johannine theology was *substantially-informed* by Memphite theology via Hellenistic Alexandria. Ptah is also the *patron of craftsmen* (sculptors, masons, architects, smiths, carpenters, jewellers) — the gods' own craftsman who created their cult-statues and their adornments. The *high priest of Ptah* held the title *wer-kherep-hemu* ("greatest of the directors of craftsmen"), the chief-craftsman of the entire Egyptian craft-tradition. He is married to *Sekhmet* (the fierce lioness — see Sekhmet entry), forming with their son *Nefertem* (the lotus-god of perfume and primordial-beauty) the *Memphite Triad*. The *Apis bull* (a specific black bull with white markings, kept at Memphis as the *living oracle of Ptah*, attested from at least the 1st Dynasty through the Greco-Roman period) was Ptah's incarnate manifestation; when an Apis bull died it was mummified and buried in the *Serapeum* (the underground necropolis at Saqqara, the largest single concentration of Apis-bull burials in the world). The Greek god *Hephaestus* was identified with Ptah (Herodotus 2.99); the Romans identified him with *Vulcan*. The composite god *Serapis* (the Hellenistic synthetic deity created by Ptolemy I) was originally *Osir-Hapi* — the dead-Apis-bull-as-Osiris, fusing Memphite Ptah-Apis with the Osirian funerary cult.

Iconography

Mummiform man — wrapped tightly in linen, only the head and hands free, holding a *was-djed-ankh composite sceptre* (the most-distinctive Ptah-iconographic element: the was-sceptre of dominion, the djed-pillar of stability, and the ankh of life all combined into one staff, showing that Ptah is the source of all three). Beardless, wearing a *tight skull-cap* (his other most-distinctive feature — distinguishing him from the bearded mummified Osiris with whom he is otherwise iconographically similar). Standing on a *plinth shaped like the ma'at-hieroglyph* (a low pedestal — Ptah stands on cosmic-truth itself). Sometimes shown in the *open shrine* (a small architectural enclosure) within which his cult-statue was housed at Memphis. The Apis bull (his living-oracle manifestation) is shown as a black bull with specific white markings — a white triangle on the forehead, a vulture-shape on the back, a scarab under the tongue.

How to invoke Ptah

Before beginning any *creative-craft work* — sculpting, building, writing, composing, designing, smithing, jewellery-making, any work where heart-and-tongue must collaborate to bring form into being. Offer: incense, water, the linen-cloth, and most-importantly *a small object of the craft itself* (a clay-figure, a written-line, a piece of cut-wood, a drop of melted-metal — the demonstration that the heart-and-tongue have already done their work). The traditional invocation: *"Hail to thee, Ptah, who fashioned the gods, who heard the petition of the suppliant, who built the cities, who established the nomes, who put every god in his shrine."* Especially called by *makers* of any kind (the Memphite tradition is *the* patron-tradition for craftsmen and artists across the entire Egyptian three thousand years); by *speakers* (the heart-and-tongue creation-theology makes Ptah the patron of authoritative-speech — leaders giving foundational speeches, teachers giving formative lectures, writers writing scriptural-or-foundational texts); by *architects* (Imhotep, the architect of the Step Pyramid of Djoser, was deified as a son of Ptah); by *physicians* (the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus invokes Ptah as patron of the surgical-craft); by *anyone in a creation-from-thought register* (the entrepreneur whose new venture exists first as an idea-in-the-heart-and-a-pitch-on-the-tongue, before any physical-product exists).

In love

Ptah in love is the partner who *creates the relationship by speech* — who proposes, who declares, who says the words that bring the partnership into being and who continues to speak the relationship into existence through the daily-renewal of declared-love. Ptah-energy in a partnership is *the creation-by-Logos register* — the love that exists *because it is spoken* and that strengthens whenever it is spoken again. The shadow is the partner whose Ptah-creation has *stopped* — the marriage that was founded by speech but in which no one has spoken the foundational-words for years, and is therefore quietly de-creating itself. The other shadow: the partner whose Ptah-craftsman register is so dominant that the relationship has become a *project to be built* rather than a *life to be shared* — every interaction is a craft-task, every conversation is a design-review, and the actual breathing-human-other has been replaced by the perfected-construction.

In work

Ptah in work is the *master-craftsman* (the senior-engineer, the master-sculptor, the chief-architect, the principal-physician — the figure whose craft is the foundational reference for everyone else in the trade); the *founder-by-speech* (the entrepreneur whose original-pitch was the Logos that created the company); the *architect* (any building-designer, but also any system-designer, organization-designer, curriculum-designer); the *teacher-of-the-craft* (the master who passes the tradition to the next-generation of craftsmen). Ptah-energy is *creation-by-thought-and-speech, executed in craft*. The shadow is the workplace whose Ptah has been *flattened to mere-managerial-craft* (the head-of-engineering who has stopped doing the actual craft-work and has become only the manager-of-others-craft); the company that has lost its *founding-Logos* and is now running on inertia, no longer being spoken-into-existence by anyone. The other shadow: the *perfectionist Ptah* — the craftsman whose standards have become so high that nothing ships, the architect whose plans are never built, the sculptor whose statue is never finished because Sekhmet his wife is consuming the workshop while he polishes.

The gift

Ptah gives the recognition that *creation begins in the heart and reaches the world through the tongue*. The thought that has not been spoken does not yet exist; the speech that has been spoken has *already* created the form that the hand will then sculpt. The gift is the willingness to *speak the foundational-words* — to declare the company's mission, to propose the marriage, to say the line that will define the next chapter — trusting that the Logos-register is the *actual* mechanism by which the heart's thought becomes the world's reality. And then, after the speaking, the willingness to take up the craft-tools and execute the form that the speech created.

The shadow

Ptah's *Memphite Logos-theology* has been almost-entirely-erased from Western intellectual history, despite being the documented precursor to the Logos-theology of John's Gospel by fifteen centuries. The Shabaka Stone is in the British Museum, the Egyptological scholarship is unambiguous, and yet Western religious-philosophy continues to treat Logos-theology as if it were a Greek-and-Hebrew invention with no Egyptian antecedent. The other shadow: the Hellenistic *Serapis* cult (Ptolemy I's synthetic god, fusing Ptah-Apis with Osiris and a Hellenistic-Greek visual register) was a *political construction* designed to give Greek-and-Egyptian subjects a shared cult-figure — and the genuine-Egyptian Ptah-cult was substantially-overshadowed by it during the Ptolemaic period, then suppressed entirely under Christianization. The third shadow: pop-culture-Ptah barely exists (there is no Mummy-franchise Ptah, no Stargate Ptah of any prominence) — but this *absence* is itself a shadow, because Ptah is the *most-important* Old-Kingdom Egyptian deity and his cultural-erasure represents the systematic-marginalization of pre-Osirian Egyptian theology. The fourth shadow: the *Memphite* register has been entirely overshadowed by the *Theban* and *Heliopolitan* in modern Egyptological reception (the New Kingdom is so dominant in tourist-Egypt that Memphis itself is barely-visited, while Luxor — the Theban site of Amun-Ra — gets all the attention). The fifth shadow: the *Imhotep* tradition (Ptah's deified architect-son, the historical-vizier of Djoser c. 2630 BCE, the world's first-named architect) has been reduced in pop-culture to *The Mummy*'s Imhotep-as-villain (the 1932 and 1999 films) — a complete-inversion of the actual Imhotep who was deified as the patron-saint of medicine and architecture.

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