The Mirror of Creation
Ancient Egyptian theology, the Mirror of Erised, and the beauty of creation.
Imagine standing before a sand-stone temple complex while fine-detailed engravings pierce your senses with bright colors and vivid imagery. You’ve heard these stories all your life, and now as you stand beneath the razor beams of the sun, you see those stories come to life. Centered amongst all these images is one of a man’s body with a hawk’s head and a round, orange sun above him. In his hand he holds an ankh, the symbol of life, because all of life depends on him rising from the underworld having beaten the serpent and standing in the heavens again as the sun.
Such an image paired with such a story demands our worship.
Ancient Egyptian mythology was very much so connected to earth and the natural world. Consider the god of the gods, Ra; “Ra embodied the power of the sun but was also thought to be the sun itself, envisioned as the great god riding in his barge across the heavens throughout the day and descending into the underworld at sunset.”1 Many of the ancient Egyptians deities were originally depicted as part man and part animal (i.e., Ra was a man with an hawk head; Sobek a man with a crocodile head). However, “by the dawn of dynastic Egypt in 3100 B.C., the gods were taking animal forms.”2 Ancient Egypt worshiped various animals, believing them to be the incarnation of the gods, and even mummified them.
As people with the imprint of God upon us living in a world covered in his signature, our hearts are helplessly drawn to our origin in Genesis. However, sin inside us fills us with pride that turns our gaze from looking at the One who made the sun to bowing before the sun itself. We look upon creation and choose to see what we want, what our hearts truly desire—a god of our own making.
In the first book of the Harry Potter series, The Philosopher’s Stone, Harry finds a mirror that shows a reflection of his parents, who he lost when he was only a tiny infant. It’s called the Mirror of Erised, and it shows people their “deepest, most desperate desire,” as Dumbledore explained to Harry.
You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.3
For those without the Holy Spirit molding their hearts towards God and chipping away sin, they look in the mirror of creation and see their hearts’ desires reflected back at them, despite the breath in their lungs declaring the grace and goodness of the Lord. This is what Paul wrote about in Romans. He said that although God had revealed himself in his invisible attributes of eternal power and divine nature through their conscience and the beauty of nature, they had ignored such deep-rooted truths within themselves and instead chose to worship the visible things of this earth (Rom. 1:18–23)—such as the burning orb of fire that provided light, caused the crops to grow, and kept them warm. That god of their creation could be manipulated and they could write stories for him from their own hearts.
But for believers, the Holy Spirit causes the scales to fall from our eyes so that we may see our God reflected in the work of his hands. Then we may tell his stories: How the sun rising does not display another day in which Ra conquered the great serpent in the Underworld, but that our Creator has chosen to shine his grace upon the righteous and unrighteous alike and has kept his promise to sustain this world. How the broken seed in the ground pictures Christ’s death for us that carved the road for our own future resurrection.
We may fear elevating nature too highly and falling in the same trap as ancient cultures such as the Egyptians, or even some of the mysticism we see today creeping into the church. This is why we need the Word, the necessary companion to the reflective revelation in nature. The Word tells us what God is like, enabling us to reveal his fingerprints. Both nature and Scripture breathe truth, but only the Word imparts the life-changing truth every person needs to receive the gospel. We need the Word that was there at creation, the Sun that overcomes the darkness.
As believers, we need nature to regularly humble us before the mighty and powerful God who keeps all in order and created it all with his words. We need it to comfort us with the faithfulness of God as the sun rises again each morning without fail and the rain continues to nourish us. We also need the wisdom and love of God that’s reflected within each of us to discern where to plant our feet. But we likewise need the Word to reveal further where the reflections fall short or grow blurry and to keep our posture turned towards our Creator rather than the created.
Joshua K. Mark, “Ra (Egyptian God),” World History Encyclopedia, May 20, 2021, https://www.worldhistory.org/Ra_(Egyptian_God)/.
Elisa Castel, “From Cats to Cows to Crocodiles, Ancient Egyptians Worshipped Many Animal Gods,” National Geographic, March 21, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/egyptians-worshipped-many-animals-cats-cows-crocodiles.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bedford Square, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2014), 229.
Well said. Curious if there's something that sparked this essay?