Becoming the Crocodile
If you stand only on the safety of the banks spearing fish, how can you know the depths of the river? Can you fathom the darkness under a ledge of rock or understand the life of the fish writhing on your spear? You mistake the teeth of the crocodile as the edge of the abyss, but the chasm is more terrible than teeth, and certain.
I fulfill the law and the law demands your blood. I am Sebak the crocodile, the catastrophe, the devourer, the necessity. Impaled on my teeth, you shall be blessed for you will glimpse truth. I am only the secrets of your own dark heart, your lust, your greed, your anger, your flesh. As long as you breathe, I shall exist to snatch you from yourself, to grind your bones and chew your flesh, to tear the darkness from your heart. I am the living power of water, the cry that catches in the throat, the sob that shatters stone.
On my teeth you smell the stink of flesh. To you I seem a living horror. But I tell you in truth, I am your own soul and it is with great sorrow that I crush the life you have made. I weep with the loss, but you do not believe. Such destruction is madness you say. You do not understand. Is it madness to cut the wheat so that bread can be made? When you were born into this bright land, did you not weep for the lost dark of the womb? Whether or not you understand the law, you exist because of it.
When you’ve reached the lips of the great devourer, you are staring into the jaws of creation.
Normandi Ellis. Awakening Osiris: A New Translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (p. 169). Title is more correctly translated as the Book of Coming into the light.
Image-Crocodile god Sobek, from the temple of Kom Ombo
