Energizing Your 9 Bodies: An Exploration of Ancient Egyptian Myth-Science

Energizing Your Nine Bodies: An Exploration of Ancient Egyptian Myth-Science, with Marques Redd

For over 3,000 years, the “myth-scientists” of ancient Egypt developed extremely complex maps of the human personality. These sacred anatomies gave rise to a wide variety of metaphysical treatises, such as The Pyramid Texts, The Book of the Dead, and The Book of Gates. At their core is the idea that humans are multi-dimensional beings composed of nine spirit bodies, ranging from the dense physical body to a body of pure light and sound waves.

In this experiential workshop, Marques Redd will provide a roadmap for approaching this spiritual system through the use of guided meditations and hieroglyphics as shamanic tools. You will be able to use the rituals presented here in your individual practice to energize and activate your nine bodies. Redd will also discuss some of the most potent insights he has gained from the past two decades of his intensive scholarly, artistic, and spiritual engagement with Egyptian spiritual sciences. Filled with cognitive complexity, wisdom, and aesthetic splendor, the ancient Egyptian tradition provides techniques for manifestation, fostering empowerment, affecting transformation, cultivating vitality, and expanding human consciousness.

Marques Redd is a traditional African cosmologist, independent scholar, multimedia artist, and co-founder of Rainbow Serpent, Inc., a Black LGBTQ art nonprofit organization. The foundation of his work is the reclamation, modernization, and extension of traditional African knowledge systems, particularly from ancient Egyptian and West African (Yoruba, Dogon, Dagara, and Igbo) contexts, and he seeks every medium he can – film, sculpture, academic scholarship, spiritual retreats, performance, and public installation – to bring the multidimensional depths of African cosmologies to the 21st century world.

Redd graduated from Harvard University with an AB in African and Afro-American Studies and Social Studies and from the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in English Literature. He has written essays on a wide variety of topics, including the poetry of jazz musician Sun Ra, the novels of Ishmael Reed, the art of the Women of Visions collective, and global 19th-century poetry. He has curated art exhibits around the country, and he provides multi-day workshops (such as Harnessing the Power of Creation through African Ritual) in partnership with The Esalen Institute.

With his collaborator Mikael Owunna, he has released several art projects. They co-directed Obi Mbu (The Primordial House), a 30-minute experimental dance film based on a Nigerian-Igbo myth of creation. Playing the Cosmic Strings is their public art collaboration with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra centered around a 1,200 sq. ft. billboard influenced by Igbo conceptualizations about the origin of music. Their live performance The Four World Ages will premiere at The Yard in July 2023, and Myth-Science of the Gatekeepers - a series of 16 glass sculptures of Black queer Kemetic deities and accompanying book - will premiere at the Pittsburgh Glass Center in March 2024.

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