9 World Chronicles

Sopdet  Sharp one

Associated: Sopdet Star (the Sirius), inundation of the Nile

Culture: North Africa Kemetic Egyptian

Cult Center: Per Sopdet

Period of Worship : predynastic peris through Greco-Roman invasion

Consort Sah (Orion)

Offspring: Sopdu Venus

The Astral Goddess

Sopdet (Sepdet, Sothis) personified the 'dog star' Sirius. This star was the most important of the stars to the ancient Egyptians.

SOPDET,  or SIRIUS, is the brightest of all the fixed, stars, and is regarded as the most important star in the sky, in Kemetic Beliefs,  forming the astronomical foundation of their religious system, delineating the rhythms, and cycles, by which they lived, and establishing its, mysterious connection, with humanity.

The heliacal rising of this star came at the time of inundation and the start of the Egyptian New Year.

 As a goddess of the inundation, she was a goddess of fertility. She also was linked to the pharaoh and his journey in the afterlife.

In the mythology of the NTRs (who would latter be called gods by the Greeks), the Sopdet star is their solar home. The source of not only these enlightened being but was viewed as the ultimate source of knowledge. This star can be seen from almost every inhabited region of Earths surface.

This celestial body was sacred to the Freemason and the order of the Eastern star.

Even as early as the 1st Dynasty, she was known as 'the bringer of the new year and the Nile flood'. When Sirius appeared in the sky each year, the Nile generally started to flood and bring fertility to the land. The ancient Egyptians connected the two events, and so Sopdet took on the aspects of a goddess of not only the star and of the inundation, but of the fertility that came to the land of Egypt with the flood. The flood and the rising of Sirius also marked the ancient Egyptian New Year, and so she also was thought of as a goddess of the New Year.

She is depicted as a nude figure wearing a conical white crown of Lower Egypt surmounted by a star. Late in Egyptian mythology she becomes largely syncretized with Isis.

heliacal rising of the bright star preceded the usual annual flooding of the Nile.[8] It was therefore apparently used for the solar civil calendar which largely superseded the original lunar calendar in the 3rd millennium BC

During the Old Kingdom, she was an important goddess of the annual flood and a psychopomp guiding deceased pharaohs through the Egyptian underworld.

From the Middle Kingdom, Sopdet sometimes appeared as a god who held up part of Nut (the sky or firmament) with Hathor.

She is also thought to be a guide in the afterlife for the pharaoh, letting him fly into the sky to join the gods, showing him 'goodly roads' in the Field of Reeds and helping him become one of the imperishable stars. She was thought to be living on the horizon, encircled by the Duat.