Opet Festival Extravaganza Marks Reopening of Avenue of Sphinxes

[ColonelZ]

UPDATED 26 NOVEMBER, 2021 - 17:57 SAHIR

Opet Festival Extravaganza Marks Reopening of Avenue of Sphinxes

Egypt hosted the re-enactment of the ancient Egyptian Opet festival last night. The grand ceremony was held to mark the reopening of the 1.7-mile-long (2.7 km) road which links the Temples of Karnak in the north and Luxor in the south, once called the Path of God.

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Paved in sandstone blocks, the 3,400-year-old road is lined on both sides with more than 1,050 statues of sphinxes and rams, which explains why it is also known as the Road of the Rams or the Avenue of the Sphinxes. The statues have been buried for centuries under the desert sand, but they have been slowly excavated ever since eight of them were first discovered outside Luxor Temple by archaeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim in 1949.

Dr. Mustafa Al-Saghir, Director General of the Karnak monuments, told CBS News that 309 statues in a good state of preservation have so far been uncovered but the number is likely to go up as excavations continue.

The lavish parade to mark the re-opening of the Avenue of Sphinxes and celebrate the Opet festival. (YouTube / Experience Egypt )

Understanding the Ancient Egyptian Opet Festival

The sacred avenue is believed to have been built to mark the Opet festival, an annual event at which the reigning pharaoh would undergo a ritual marriage ceremony with the deity Amun. Held annually in the second month of the Nile flooding season, the festival celebrated the fertility of the gods and the pharaohs.

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During the Opet Festival, the Theban deities Amun-Re, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu were transported from Karnak to Luxor in three divine boats carried by priests for the festival. The journey was made on foot along the Avenue of Sphinxes or sometimes by boat along the Nile River . It was in Luxor that the marriage ceremony was held. The reigning king decided on the length of the festival and at its close the deities were carried back to Karnak.

The ancient Egyptian Opet Festival was celebrated with music, dance, a dramatic parade and a great helping of Egyptian-style pomp. ( Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities – Egypt )

“The Opet Festival will be held, as it was in the past at the time of the Pharaohs,” explained Ali Abu Dashish, archaeologist and member of the Egyptian Archaeological Union, according to news.com.au. The kick-off, on the 25th November 2021, featured a lavish parade with dancers in traditional dress, light displays, an orchestra, horse-drawn pharaonic chariots and boats on the Nile.

The Opet Festival celebrations were meant to send a message to the world that “we preserve and restore antiquities,” continued Abu Dashish. Reuters reported that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi marched along the road at the opening of the ceremony.

The Opet Festival celebrations marked the opening of the Sphinx Avenue in Luxor, considered the largest open museum in the world. ( Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities – Egypt )

But, When Was the Avenue of the Sphinxes Built?

While archaeologists are in unison over the purpose of the road, there is no agreement about who started the process of building it. According to some experts, it could have been Queen Hatshepsut about 3,500 years ago. But Dr. Al-Saghir has highlighted that researchers haven’t found "any archaeological evidence on the road to back this theory.”

Others date the Avenue of the Sphinxes to King Amenhotep III who came to the throne a couple of hundred years after Queen Hatshepsut, in 1390 BC. However, Dr. Al-Saghir has also show skepticism of this theory, believing that some artifacts found on that road dating to that pharaoh’s reign were moved there later.

“The oldest monument we discovered of the road goes back to King Tutankhamun, who made the first 300 meters (984 ft) from the 10th pylon of the Karnak Temple to the gate of the Mut Temple,” explained Al-Saghir. This backs his belief that the road was conceived and launched by the famous King Tutankhamun around 3,000 years ago.

The Opet Festival celebration and parade along the Avenue of Sphinxes that runs between Karnack and Luxor. ( Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities – Egypt )

Restoring the Avenue of the Sphinxes

While experts may not agree on who initiated the project, they mostly concur that the majority of it, a stretch of around 2,400 yards (2,194 m), was built under King Nectanebo I , the founder of the 30th and last native dynasty of Egypt, about 2,400 years ago.

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The road has undergone several restoration efforts since being discovered in 1949, the latest of which began in 2017. As archaeologists have mapped the road, the restoration has entailed the demolition of some buildings that came up along the route once it was abandoned. These include mosques, houses and a church.

The grand parade and Opet festival celebrations were held to mark the reopening of the ancient road linking Karnak to Luxor, Egypt’s second most-visited tourist site after the Giza pyramids . They were also intended to promote Luxor as one of the largest open museums in the world.

Top image: Fireworks at the Opet festival at Luxor’s Sphinx Avenue opening. Source: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities – Egypt

By Sahir Pandey

[ColonelZ]

AS THOROUGHLY DETAILED IN “ZEITGEIST 2025” WHERE DR. THOMAS HORN EXPLAINS THE ANCIENT FESTIVAL OF OPET AND ITS CONNECTION WITH AMERICAN PRESEDENTIAL INNAUGURATIONS AND THE PROPHECY ON THE GREAT SEAL—Egypt Reopens “Avenue Of Sphinxes” For 2025 Second Coming Of OPET Entities, Antichrist

November 28, 2021 by SkyWatch Editor

CBS NEWS: As Americans looked forward to the time-honored tradition of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, almost 6,000 miles away, Egypt was hoping to revive a tradition of its own, which likely hasn’t been seen in a couple thousand years. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities was to hold a grand ceremony on Thursday evening to mark the reopening of the ancient Avenue of Sphinxes in the city of Luxor. The sacred road, once named “The Path of God,” connects the Temples of Karnak in the north with Luxor in the south. Every year, ancient Egyptians would hold a festival called “Opet” in the second month of the Nile flooding season to celebrate the fertility of the gods and the pharaoh.

Dr. Thomas Horn explains in greater detail (below) the significance of this grand-scale development in his best-selling book ZEITGEIST 2025:

In Egypt, where rituals were performed to actually “raise” the spirit of Osiris into the reigning Pharaoh, political authority in the form of divine kingship or theocratic statesmanship was established (later reflected in the political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy or “the divine right of kings,” who supposedly derived their right to rule from the will of God, with the exception in some countries that the king is subject to the Church and the pope). This meant, among other things, that the Egyptian Pharaoh enjoyed extraordinary authority as the “son of the sun god” (Ra) and the incarnation of the falcon god Horus during his lifetime. At death, Pharaoh became the Osiris, the divine judge of the netherworld, and on earth, his son and predecessor took his place as the newly anointed manifestation of Horus. Thus each generation of pharaohs provided the gods with a spokesman for the present world and for the afterlife while also offering the nation divinely appointed leadership.

Yet the observant reader may wonder, “Was there something more to the Pharaoh’s deification than faith in ritual magic?” The cult center of Amun-Ra at Thebes may hold the answer, as it was the site of the largest religious structure ever built—the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak—and the location of many extraordinary mysterious rites. The great temple with its miles of walls and gardens (the primary object of fascination and worship by the nemesis of Moses—the Pharaoh of the Exodus, Ramses II) was the place where each Pharaoh reconciled his divinity in the company of Amun-Ra during the festival of Opet. The festival was held at the temple of Luxor and included a procession of gods carried on barges up the Nile River from Karnak to the temple. The royal family accompanied the gods on boats while the Egyptian laity walked along the shore, calling aloud and making requests of the gods. Once at Luxor, the Pharaoh and his entourage entered the holy of holies, where the ceremony to raise the spirit of Osiris into the king was performed and Pharaoh was transmogrified into a living deity. Outside, large groups of dancers and musicians waited anxiously. When the king emerged as the “born-again” Osiris, the crowd erupted in gaiety. From that day forward, the Pharaoh was considered to be—just as the god ciphered in the Great Seal of the United States will be—the son and spiritual incarnation of the Supreme Deity. The all-seeing eye of Horus/Apollo/Osiris above the unfinished pyramid on the Great Seal represents this event.

Fast forward to today and, at the inauguration of every American president, across town at the House of the Temple, the modern Egyptian magicians (Freemasons) simultaneously conduct the “Raising of Osiris” ceremony to call the seed of Osiris-Apollo from the underworld through the Washington monument obelisk, where it magically emits into the US Capitol Dome while America’s new leader stands there accepting his role as the living representative of Osiris. This is done in anticipation of the day when events will surpass parody and “the beast that…was, and is not; shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition [Greek Apollo]: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is” (Revelation 17:8).

For a few adepts of history and secret orders, the DC ritual is deliciously staged as even the term “inaugurate” is from the Latin inauguratio, and refers to the archaic ceremony by which the Roman augurs (soothsayers) approved a king or ruler (or other action) through omens as being sanctioned by the god Jupiter, the same entity whose prophecies on the Great Seal herald his upcoming challenge to Yahweh-Jehovah for heavenly supremacy while his son Apollo-Osiris seizes authority over the world in a final pagan Golden Age.