In our eternal covenant, where the word was born before the voice, and in the ancient faith of our ancestors, etched not in scrolls, but in the stillness of our souls, there exists a being who cannot be named, cannot be confined, cannot be erased.
He is… “He whose name is reproached,” not because he is pure evil, but because he willed what was willed for him, and thus he became.
He is… the one who rebelled against his brother, revealing the essence of conflict within the heart of unity. Lord of deserts and storms—not because he chose them, but because they chose him.
We do not speak his name, not out of fear, but because to name is to invoke, and to invoke is to summon, and to summon is to open the door to presence.
How can one name something already present in the storm?
How can one condemn the shadow of light amid brilliance?
He is no mere rebel, but a mirror.
Not a traitor, but a veil over what must remain hidden.
He is chaos when chaos is called for.
He is the storm when the world reaches its limit.
And when his red winds rise from Deshret, the land that knows no rain, we know he draws near, not as an enemy, but as a monk arriving with his crooked staff, to renew every unspoken fear, every death not understood, and every transformation denied.
In Utterance 356 of the Pyramid Texts, he is named:
“The blast of storm against the sky.”
But when I contemplate this utterance, I find myself asking:
Who said the sky does not need a reminder that it is never still?
Thus, our ancestors passed on the saying:
“He who calls the storm must anchor the boat of his soul.”
Yet they did not tell me how.
All they left was this:
The journey inward requires no feet, only loss, in the presence of a teacher who hides his face behind a mask of dust.
This is how we Egyptians are:
We do not fear him, even when we summon him, because we know: There is no fear in a storm through which we have passed,
and from which we are born anew, not as we were, but as we were always meant to be.
Omar El-Moutaz Bel'lah
