Walking on the Moon in Ancient Egypt

July 21, 1969.

My leg bounced with nervous excitement as Neil Armstrong descended the ladder. I was sixteen years old, crammed into the living room with family and friends, and convinced I was watching gods walk on the moon. Who else but gods could stride between worlds?

It wasn’t the first time space had dazzled me. Eight years earlier, on May 5, 1961, my teacher marched our class into the school auditorium, where a hulking nineteen-inch black-and-white television perched on the stage. We watched Alan Shepard launch into space on Freedom 7, the first American astronaut. That was it for me. I was hooked.

Back then, I was certain I would grow up to be an astronaut.

But as my imagination grew, so did my sense of reality. My on-again, off-again fear of flying probably wasn’t going to square with a career in space travel. So instead of living the moon dream, I dipped my toes into writing about it.

And then my gaze shifted from the new frontier to a previous love, an older, more mysterious one: mythology.

From Space to Gods

My fascination with space never truly left me, but mythology dug in deeper. I minored in World Mythology in college. My major? Rhetoric, the art of using language to persuade, move, and inspire. A good choice for someone destined to write stories about gods.

Of all the mythologies, ancient Egypt called to me the most. The god Thoth (I call him by one of his Egyptian names, Djhuty) was strongly associated with the moon.

Like the astronauts I once idolized, Djhuty was a boundary-crosser. He was the god who kept the universe in balance, who moved between the worlds of the living and the dead. He stood on Ra’s solar barque each night as it traveled through the underworld.

Djhuty and Seshat writing on the Tree of Life

Djhuty was the judge in divine disputes and gifted humans with writing, science, and magic (heka). He was, in every sense, a Renaissance god before his time.

Seshat, his good friend, was just coincidentally the Goddess of Writing.

And like the astronauts, Djhuty loomed larger than life — not just a god, but part scientist, part magician, and part explorer.

Write What You Know

How many times have we all heard that phrase and wondered what it meant? (And then cheerfully ignored the advice when it contradicted what we wanted to do.)

Well, I knew a couple of things. I knew about the moon, and I knew about Egyptian mythology.

It turned out that they had something in common. The moon landing, mythology, and the stories I wanted to write all involved stepping across thresholds and daring to enter unknown worlds.

And for me, that adventure always began with a story.

Bringing it All Together

In Queen of Heka: The Autobiography of Isis, I had to imagine another sixteen-year-old encountering the impossible. I had watched a man walk on the moon. Iset (Isis) watched a god of the moon walk out of the mist onto the banks of the Nile.

In one of my favorite scenes, that god is Djhuty, who becomes her tutor — a role he played in the myths.

An ibis emerged from the fog. With each step, the bird lengthened into a man. The long, webbed feet became well-muscled legs. White feathers molted into an elaborately pleated kilt. The transformation ended at the neck. When the bird’s beady eyes fixed on me, all the noise in the world stopped.

Heru spoke into the inhuman silence. “May I present the teacher of all teachers, Djhuty, Lord of Truth and Time.”

The great god bowed. His beak opened like a black crescent moon in the white mist. “Hail, Iset wer-Heka, Mistress of the Throne.”

“I’m just Iset.” I giggled for the first time that day. Daily commerce with Heru clearly had not prepared me for the company of other gods.

“You are the lady who will learn words of power,” Djhuty said.

I never walked on the moon. I have walked along the Nile, although never with the gods. But writing gave me a way to do both.