Tirza Schaefer: Romance Author & Goddess Facilitator
Wadjet
I love to explore the Divine Feminine and write about Goddesses. For a list of those, click on the link: Goddesses. In order to become more balanced within ourselves and, through that, to bring greater balance and harmony to the world around us, we must find greater balance between the masculine and feminine energies within ourselves that each one of us possesses, regardless of physical gender or any other ways of self-identification.
​
Protective Deity & Symbol of Lower Egypt
Wadjet is an ancient Egyptian Goddess, her name means Green One. This is in reference to the colour of the serpent whom she represents or to the Nile Delta with which she is associated as a symbol of Lower Egypt, as the vulture Goddess Nekhbet-Mut is the symbol of Upper Egypt. Wadjet is one of the most ancient of Egyptian deities.
Although Wadjet is part of the Egyptian crown and existed as a deity even before the unification of Egypt, she doesn’t feature in the spiritually oriented Pyramid Texts, unlike her counterpart Nekhbet, because she is more associated with the physical world, the world of the living. However, she was closely tied to Pharaoh as his protective deity.
Her role as Mothergoddess comes from the circumstance that Wadjet also acted as nursemaid to young Horus. Amongst other Goddesses, she was also associated with the Eye of Ra. She is depicted as a Cobra rearing its head. The hood is spread, so she looks as if she is ready to strike. Sometimes she also wears the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. On the death mask of Tut Ankh Amun, she is depicted as cobra alongside her twin Nekhbet, the vulture.
The poison of an Egyptian cobra is lethal and the fact that Wadjet with the solar disc, which in combination is called the uraeus, is part of the crown of Pharaoh, tells not only of the great power of the monarch himself but of his powerful divine protectors and the fact that his rule is ordained by the Gods.
Divine Executive
​
Wadjet is alternatively known as Wedjat, Uadjet, and Udjo and to the Greeks as Uto or Buto. She originates in the ancient city of Dep which later became part of Per-Wadjet, which means House of Wadjet, nowadays known as Desouk. The city was an important location in cultural developments in Palaeolithic times, which was prehistoric Egypt.
In the mythology about Isis, it is said that Wadjet took on the role as the nursemaid of Isis and Osiris’ son Horus, a solar deity when they hid the child from the wrath of his evil uncle Set in the swamps of the Nile Delta. Wadjet not only nursed the infant boy but also protected him, while the Goddess Serket was the protector of his mother Isis.
In the Pyramid Texts, Wadjet is said to have created the first papyrus plant and primordial swamp. According to another myth, Wadjet was the daughter of Atum, later then it changed to Ra, who sent her as his eye to find Tefnut (moisture) and Shu (air) when they were lost in the waters of Nun. He was so happy when they returned that he cried and created the first human beings from his tears. To reward his daughter, he placed her upon his head in the form of a cobra so that she would always be close to him and could act as his protector.
Wadjet was sent out as the Eye of Ra by the God himself and nearly caused the destruction of mankind. Then there is another story, which shows her close link to the Goddess Ma’at. One day, the God Geb attacked his mother Tefnut and raped her. When he then crowned himself as king, Wadjet attacked him and his followers from her place on his crown, killing all and only Geb was left very sick indeed. Wadjet, serving the divine principle of justice and righteousness, personified in the Goddess Ma’at, was not prepared to let this deed go unpunished.
The Fierce & the Gentle
As fierce and aggressive as this account makes Wadjet seem, she also has a gentler side which is shown in her role as nursemaid to Horus and as protector of women giving birth. She also protected the adult Horus, together with her sister Nekhbet and flanked him as a winged solar disc to guard him against the followers of Set. Later, the queens of Egypt also wore her and Nekhbet in their headdresses.
At the beginning of the Predynastic era, before 3,100 BCE, Wadjet was first depicted to be winding around a papyrus stem, which is believed to be the first symbol of a snake winding around a staff. In this way, she is not only honoured as the creator of papyrus, possibly the most important plant in Egypt as people wrote on scrolls made from papyrus, but it also a symbol of her great healing powers, as is her connection with Sekhmet who is not only the Goddess of War, but also of the healing sciences.
In the Stone of Light series by French Egyptologist and freemason Christian Jacq, the chief priestess in the village of masons, building the Royal and aristocratic tombs in the Valley of the Kings, is a woman closely working with Goddess Meretseger, another Egyptian Cobra Goddess. Cobras are also venomous snakes and their poison can kill, but from it, you can also make powerful medicine when you are an initiate of the healing arts.
In my article on Meretseger, I describe this Goddess as wild and untamed, an ascetic, a shaman. Wadjet is different. It took me a while to write this blog, not in itself, but to psyche myself up to it. I had already written about Manasa and Meretseger and about Python as Power Animal. Quite frankly, I had had enough of serpent energies. Being just on the road to recovery from several weeks of illness while my body went through and had to adjust to so many upgrades and content with hormonal changes brought on by peri-menopausal changes in my body, I simply couldn’t take more intensity, more cobra medicine. It is not a gentle one and my body was already weakened, not to mentioned my frayed nerves.
But then the day came where I felt ready, also knowing a friend was still waiting for more information as this was going to be the annual Goddess I had drawn for her in a short reading. At this point, I have to say I am blessed to have such understanding, loving and patient friends. My youngest daughter was a little sick and we were cuddling up on the couch, her reading and me writing. And then this vision overcame me and I met the Goddess Wadjet. My daughter later told me that she tried to speak to me, but I was only blankly staring at the screen of my laptop, which I personally have no recollection of.
The Wise Old Crone
I met Wadjet in the form of a giant cobra and she was smiling at me. She is definitely a Crone Goddess, having the energy of the wise old woman. She told me that it was no coincidence that I had lately so often had the feeling that I was capable of great magic. In fact, I had been slipping in and out of parallel realities in my mind where this was quite possible and my role in life was a different one as well.
Wadjet told me that these were inner realities that called to me and that I was on the path of the Goddess, absorbing the powers of the spiritual serpent kingdom, specifically cobra Goddesses within me. She didn’t say that this was my ultimate destination or purpose in life, but a stage I needed to go through in order to be able to embrace more of my own power.
“You are a magician, a healer and a warrior. You are all that, but it is now time to lay down your weapons of the young warrior and begin to embrace your crone powers. This means more quiet time, inner stillness, shutting out the noise from the outside world, both physical and digital,” the Goddess explained to me.
It made sense because I had been craving silence throughout my purging experience, which wasn’t always granted. Trying to keep a family happy while going through some of the most intense moments in your spiritual development thus far, whilst being thrown off-kilter by raging hormones isn’t an easy feat, and the therapist I asked for help told me that I would be fine, but that I couldn’t expect my children to understand what hormonal imbalances in the body really meant. Of course, my children had been affected by it as well, but all would be well in the end. The therapist told me, I was a great mum and not to worry too much and sent me on my way.
Wadjet told me that she was the grand mother of all serpent deities and that there was a reason why I had been drawn to write about the other two cobra Goddess first before reaching a point where I felt ready to connect with her energy. She said she was the late stage in the cycle of the cobra mysteries. But this isn’t the same as life cycles. You go through these stages several times in your human life when the Goddess calls you, and it always means expanding in different areas. It means that you learn to adapt and respond to various triggers in a new way.
In my romance novel The Right Kind of Wrong, the female protagonist Kenna and her male counterpart Zane know each other from college days. Their interactions then had been marked by the avoidance of truth to the point where both got hurt so deeply that those feelings still rankle twenty years later.
When they meet again, however, all those pent-up emotions from years of unresolved frustrations rear their ugly head. Both believe themselves to be the ones who have been wronged and when it comes to a point where all professionalism cannot keep those warring feelings at bay any longer, both must find a new way of dealing with each other to avoid inflicting more of the kind of pain they had in the past, not only on the other but also on themselves.
For once, both speak the truth and this has surprising consequences.
​
The Purging Fire Within
Wadjet is about learning and integrating those new ways of responding. She takes you beyond realising that some of your responses have been not in the greatest alignment with divine rule, i.e. inefficient, upsetting, or even hurt and harmful. Instead, you are now learning new ways of interacting and responding with yourself and others. You bring your relationships to a new level by training yourself to respond in a more loving way.
This does not mean, you let go of ambitions or allow yourself to be walked over, but it means finding ways of reaching your objectives within the relationship you have with yourself and those you have with others in a more efficient and loving way, a more gentle one. Wadjet is still the powerful and lethal striking cobra, but when you know which dosage to use from her poison and how to add it to the overall mix, you won’t burn bridges or harm yourself or others in the process, either through words or deeds, but bring them around to your side with gentle persuasion and loving invitation.
Wadjet is the teacher and the actor. She will gift you her great powers together with the knowledge to use it wisely and with discernment. She lovingly holds you in her heart, but will also fiercely defend you when necessary, although, by her own admission – and she told me that with an indulgent, amused smirk -, this is not necessary as often as most humans might think.
Thus, when Wadjet enters your life, be prepared to go through some purging fires in order to find the inner peace and solitude you have longed for and hadn’t even known. Be gentle with your children while teaching them firmly and use your power for one single, powerful gesture of setting boundaries, rather than depleting your energy in unnecessary disempowered battles against windmills that are not and never have been the real enemies. In fact, your “enemies” (if you want to call them that, but according to Wadjet, challengers is a much better word) have only been able to hold such power over you so far because you did not assert and embrace your own. If you had, they would never have had any hold over you in the first place.