Who is Seker? The Myth, story, history of Seker the Egyptian God. Information on the Gods of ancient Egypt.
Seker; An Egyptian funerary god in the form of a mummified man with the head of a falcon. Seker’s cult centre was the necropolis of Memphis and his domain one of the divisions of the underworld, where the serpent-like Nehebkau lay in wait for the dead. Often Seker was identified with Osiris, who also appears swathed like a mummy, and with the divine artificer Ptah, whose cult was celebrated in the city of Memphis. It has been suggested that Ptah’s name may share the same origin as the Semitic rool ‘to open’, implying, as with Min, an early connection with fertility.
Another mummiform deity with the head of an ape was Hapy, one of the four sons of Horus. His special duty was to guard the jar containing controversy with St Peter. The Acts of Peter, whose theme is the demise of Simon, may have been Ebionite in origin. The real opponents of St Paul were undoubtedly the leaders of the Jewish converts living in Jerusalem. They included the original disciples of Jesus and they seem to have rejected the version of the faith expounded to the Gentiles by St Paul, a Hellenistic Jew and the first saint not to have known the historical Messiah. He viewed conversion as the adoption of a new religion, Christianity, which had discarded the trappings of Hebrew belief, like circumcision and the payment of temple tithes. After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70, the challenge to St Paul’s theology ceased, and converts were freely accepted into the fold.
The germinal significance of Simon Magus was recognized. Bishop Irenaeus (130-200) wrote that from him ‘all heresies originated. … He led about with him a certain Helen, after he had redeemed her from a life of prostitution in Tyre. … He said she was the first conception of his mind, the Mother of all, through whom in the beginning he had the idea of making angels and archangels. This Idea, leaping forth from him and knowing what her father had willed, descended and generated angels and archangels, by whom this world was created.’ Angelic envy and ignorance led to her enslavement in a human body, so that her soul ‘transmigrated’ down the ages, once animating Helen of Troy, till finally Simon came ‘to rescue her and free her from her bonds, before he offered men salvation through his knowledge’.
Gnosis, ‘knowledge’, was the principal claim of people like Simon Magus, who passed on to initiates an understanding of the cosmos, human nature, and destiny. The sharp dichotomy of body and soul in Gnosticism found a cosmological analogue in the opposition of the Demiurge and the supreme being, which Simon said he was. Although the Demiurge created the world, about ad 160 the Gnostic philosopher Ptolemaeus wrote that this being, ‘who is impotent to know spiritual things, considered he was the only God and said through the prophets “There is no other one”‘. The archetypal conjurer, Simon Magus is only remembered today in the sin of simony.
