The rituals and beliefs of neopagan kemetic movements

This thesis investigates the groups trying to revive the Ancient Egyptian religion throughout the 20th century as the Kemetic Orthodoxy, the Ausar Auset Society and the Church of the Most High Goddess and other minor Kemetic movements. Because there hadn't been done a serious research on these kind of new religious movement before we came directly in contact with the Kemetics and went through the religious initiation processes for our research to be done correctly. For our thesis we used the websites in which the Kemetics write their religious views as well. In our thesis we try to find answer about what Kemetism really is and what his characteristics are. We found out that the Kemetics are divided into several disciplines in belief and in ritual. So we concluded that there are three different types of Kemetic movements: The Orthodox Kemetism who takes the Ancient Egyptian scriptures literally, the Reconstructionist Kemetism who adds into or removes from Egyptian theology, and lastly the Afrocentric Kemetism who beliefs in the racial supremacy of the black skinned people and whose main objective is the spiritual evolution of men. We explained that the Kemetic development in history is highly connected with the history of the United States and of Neopaganism and we showed with examples how Islam, Christianity and Budhism influenced the Kemetic thought. We explained how the Kemetics describe themselves as monolatrists, how they approach the Ancient Egyptian gods and what value they put on the human being. We found out that the Kemetics have seperated view on the gods and the goddesses and have mainly two ideas about the concept of god. The first one is the believe that the gods reside inside the human being and can be achieved through inner investigation while the second one believes that the gods are outside and should be respected through action and worship. We did research on their beliefs of the life after death, paradise and hell and concluded that some Kemetics take the Egyptian view literally while others take it as metaphorical. And with that we researched the importance of the Ancient Egyptian concept of truth and justice, the goddess Maat and how it has an impact on the ethical thoughts of the Kemetics. We explained that the Kemetic rituals include offering, praying to the ancestors, yoga, meditation, oracl and worship in front of a shrine and what festivals there are in Kemetic calendar. Lastly we explained how the Kemetic movements took the Ancient Egyptian state system and incorporated it into their hierarchical structure of kings and queens and priests and priestesses.