Current location:	home again, home again, jiggity jig
Current mood:	calm
Current music:	cats meowing

I am so squeeky clean!
So yesterday, on very little planning, Nehwen and I woke up at 3am to drive down to the Temple in Joliet for the sacred baths.  For those of you who don't know what the sacred baths are, they are a series of 7 herbal (and some other things) baths that are prepared ritually and used to bath the head of the participants.  The sacred baths take place as the final optional activity during the week-long Wep Ronpet festival (the ending and beginning of the sacred years)

Each bath is named after a different Ancient Egyptian God/dess, and has differnent spiritual/emotional effects.  The first one, for instance, is called the Sekhmet bath, and is designed to remove all the ickiness, the impurities, and the crud - to give everyone a clean, pure state for the other 6 baths to follow.  The 5th one is called the Wesir bath, and is designed to help with clarity of understanding, especially in the areas of herbal and other types of healing.

Sometimes the baths can be very emotional, with wailing, crying, laughter, singing, etc.  Sometimes the baths can be very sollom, and cause a lot of introspection.  Each time one goes through the baths, it will affect you differently.  The final note that one should know about is that some of the gods/goddesses that each bath is named after will appear through Saq (a style of ritual possession from Ancient Egypt) to take part in the baths and add special blessings, change things around, etc.  Some of Them will almost always appear, some of Them never do.

I am not going to go into much detail about what happened, but if you are interested in what happened last time I went through this ritual (3 years ago... http://padjaiemweru.livejournal.com/2005/08/15/ .  I will say that my experience was very different this time, and yet just as meaningful and profound (if not moreso).

It was great fun to meet a bunch of folk that I've only met online (although it was a bit daunting to see so many faces when I arrived that I had no idea who they were : o .  In fact, because I am so horrible with names, I would really appriciate it if anyone who was there (who I didn't already know really well) could remind me who you are and something along the lines of where you were sitting and/or what you were wearing, etc.