Anyone who has spent time around a difficult person knows how draining it can be. A coworker who blames you for every mistake, a relative who turns every talk into a fight or a friend who spreads rumors can leave you tired and unsettled for days. Many people look for an inner tool that can help them stay calm in those moments. This post explores one such idea, which combines the Egyptian concept of Ma'at with the psychological notion of projection, and it also explains where its limits lie. The image of a mirror is an old and useful one. A mirror does not argue or attack. It shows what is placed in front of it. In the spiritual reading that follows, the mirror is a way to stop taking in the anger or insults of others and to return them to their source. Used with care, it can be a helpful way to protect your peace. Used as a belief that you can control other people through energy, it becomes misleading. Ma'at and the Feather of Truth In ancient Egypt, Ma'at was a cent...

A lion's body, a human head and a gaze that has outlasted some forty-five centuries: the Great Sphinx of Giza is among the oldest monuments on earth still doing the work it was made for, which is to watch. Its Greek cousin, a winged woman who asked travelers a riddle, is a different creature with a different job. Between them they gave the world a word for anything that guards a secret, and a figure that stands at the door of thresholds, the place where one thing turns into another. The Sphinx of Giza The Great Sphinx was carved from a ridge of limestone on the Giza plateau, beside the pyramids. It is about 73 meters long and 20 meters high. Most Egyptologists date it to the reign of the pharaoh Khafre, around 2500 BCE, and see its face as a portrait of the king in the royal headcloth, though the question is debated. It belonged to a larger complex of temples beside the pyramid of Khafre. The Egyptians did not call it the Sphinx. The word is Greek. An Egyptian term, shesep-an...

In the year 531, according to the historian Agathias, seven Greek philosophers made a long journey east, out of the Roman Empire and into Persia. They had been drawn by a rumor: that the new Persian king, Khosrow I, was a lover of philosophy, a sort of Plato on the throne. Two years earlier, the emperor Justinian had banned the teaching of philosophy by pagans in Athens, and the philosophers wanted a place where they could think freely. Among them was a scholar from Cilicia named Simplicius. His disappointment with the Persian court was quick, and his reaction to it was extraordinary: he turned to writing. The commentaries he produced rank among the great treasures of ancient thought. Seven Philosophers and a King Simplicius was born in Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey, around 490. He studied in Alexandria under Ammonius, and later in Athens under Damascius, the last head of the Platonic Academy. When the Academy lost its right to teach in 529, Damascius and six colleagues,...

A word of English comes from him, though most people who use it have never heard his name. To commit simony is to buy or sell a church office, and the term goes back to a man in the Book of Acts named Simon, who saw the apostles lay hands on believers and offered them money for the power to do the same. Peter rebuked him sharply. That is nearly all the New Testament says. Later Christian writers decided that this Simon of Samaria, called Simon Magus, was the first of all heretics, and attributed to his circle a strange and beautiful text called the Great Announcement . Simon in Acts The scene is in the eighth chapter of Acts. In the city of Samaria, a man named Simon had practiced magic and amazed the people, claiming to be someone great, and they called him "the Great Power of God." When Philip preached, Simon believed and was baptized. Then Peter and John arrived and gave the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands. Simon offered them money for the same ability. Peter a...

In most tellings of the crucifixion, Jesus dies in agony while his followers weep. One Coptic text from Egypt gives a startling picture. The apostle Peter looks up and sees the Savior glad and laughing above the cross, while another figure is being nailed to it. Peter asks what he is seeing, and the reply is one of the strangest answers in early Christian writing. The Apocalypse of Peter was lost for centuries and was found only in 1945, in a jar of papyrus books near Nag Hammadi. It shows us a Christian world far wider, and angrier, than the one handed down by the churches. Not the Other Apocalypse of Peter Two different books carry this title. The better known Apocalypse of Peter is a Greek work of the second century that gives a tour of heaven and hell, with graphic punishments for sinners. Some early churches read it as Scripture. The one found at Nag Hammadi (Codex VII, third text) is a different book altogether. It survives only in Coptic, in a translation of a lost Greek...

A boy with feathered wings rises from an island, laughing, with his father beside him. He looks up at the sun and goes higher. The wax that holds his wings together softens, the feathers fall away, and he drops into the sea. Almost everyone knows the end of this story. Fewer know the rest of it: the labyrinth, the stolen years, the father's earlier crime, and the quiet detail that has made the tale last. The myth of Icarus is often told as a warning against pride, but the oldest tellings are stranger and sadder than that. The Craftsman and the King Daedalus was the most famous inventor of Greek legend, an Athenian craftsman who worked for King Minos of Crete. He built the Labyrinth, the maze where the Minotaur, half man and half bull, was kept. When Theseus of Athens came to Crete and defeated the monster with the help of Minos' daughter Ariadne, the king suspected that Daedalus had helped. Minos imprisoned the inventor and his young son Icarus on the island, and he watch...