Talk:Heka (god)

The word "magic"

The first paragraph of the article states, "The term "Heka" was also used for the practice of magical ritual and, through the Coptic word "hik", is the source of the word "magic". Etymology of Magic: late 14c., "art of influencing events and producing marvels," from O.Fr. magique, from L. magice "sorcery, magic," from Gk. magike (presumably with tekhne "art"), fem. of magikos "magical," from magos "one of the members of the learned and priestly class," from O.Pers. magush, possibly from PIE *magh- "to be able, to have power".

Nothing about "hik" or "heka". If there is an alternate etymology please provide a source for it. Lily20 (talk) 20:50, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Yes you are right this article is confusing and does not give sources for some of the ideas e.g. that Heka means activation of the ka. This may be true but would require He to mean activate which I am not at all sure about. I think what may be being suggested in a rather circular way is that a term for ritual gave rise to a term for magic but Heka is clearly not the source of the English word magic. So I will remove that part.Apepch7 (talk) 22:42, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you!Lily20 (talk) 18:33, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Illustration

This looks more like Harpocrates than Heka - the source says its from Denderah and is Heka the child - I have never come across this epithet before. Anyone familiar with Denderah?Apepch7 (talk) 20:02, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

I've never been to Dendera (unfortunately), but I do think the image is credible. Wilkinson says that in the Late Period Heka was depicted as a child, so Dendera was built after Heka began to be depicted that way. For the most part, I think the child forms of Egyptian deities loked alike. The notes for the image file call it "Heka-pa-chered", which resembles the Egyptian name of Horus the Child, "Har-pa-chered", which the Greeks rendered as "Harpocrates". I suppose somebody might have confused the two, but it seems more likely that "pa-chered" means "the child", and the Dendera relief is depicting Heka the Child. The file also claims to be taken from a public-domain work by Auguste Mariette, who presumably read hieroglyphs well enough to know what god he was looking at. A. Parrot (talk) 20:17, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Any relation?

Considering Heka is the god of magic, is there any connection to the Greek goddess Hecate? Given the somewhat overlapping domains and the similarity in the names I'd be surprised if there wasn't some sort of connection, but I realize it could hypothetically be a coincidence, too, especially as the more-detailed seeming Hecate article makes no mention of Heka (though, strangely, it says her name has been "compared" to the Egyptian goddess of childbirth).

Is there any scholarly study on this possibility? I'm not familiar with anthropology circles enough to know off the bat what would be a Reliable Source in that field.108.188.199.60 (talk) 18:31, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Is it possible it could also bear a relation to words hex, hexe, heks, etc. in Germanic languages? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 51.37.170.247 (talk) 04:06, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Merger proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Vorziblix and I agreed, and nobody has objected in 7 months. We discussed moving this page to a different title, but I'd rather do that separately, later. A. Parrot (talk) 18:59, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

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The article heku discusses the selfsame concept as this one and should probably be merged into Heka (god); as the etymology section of this article says, they represent the same Egyptian word, ḥkꜣ(w). The article titles just use different anglicizations. The only difference between the articles is that one takes the personification of this concept as a god as its starting point, whereas the other starts with it as an abstraction, but each goes on to talk about the other. Separating them doesn’t make much sense. —Vorziblix (talk) 16:56, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

• Support. I always wanted to make this change myself, but I never bothered to propose the merge, figuring I'd take care of it when I got around to rewriting the article. I liken heka to maat. Both are concepts that are indispensable to understanding Egyptian religion, and both are personified by deities who are not very prominent compared with other members of the pantheon. Maat the goddess and maat the concept are covered in a single article, and we can treat Heka the god and heka the concept the same way. A. Parrot (talk) 00:23, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

On second thought, though, I agree with the merge but don't think the merged article's title should be "Heka (god)". As I said, the concept of heka was much more important than the deity as a deity. Unfortunately, heka is a disambiguation page, so we need some kind of disambiguator in the title of the merged article. "Heka (concept)" might work. A. Parrot (talk) 05:07, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that sounds sensible; I agree. Or we could move the disambiguation page to Heka (disambiguation) and this page to Heka, since the Egyptian concept seems to be by far the primary topic with that name, cf. Google web search and Google Books search. Vorziblix (talk) 20:56, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I've merged the two pages, although the text at Heku was so poorly written that I didn't actually copy any of its text; I just mentioned a few deities that it mentioned into this article. I should rewrite the page so it properly explains this concept, which is integral to Egyptian religion. A. Parrot (talk) 19:19, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

misquote

You misquoted Goelet. Actually the passage from Paul Mirecki's sarcophage script reads: "I am he whom the Unique Lord MADE* before Duality had yet come into being..."

So, Heka DID NOT exist before duality had yet come into being.

• We can infer, therefore, that Heka is the Son of Duality, the Universe, [the MAtrix]. His parents are Neith and Khnum. Stjohn1970 (talk) 09:22, 16 December 2023 (UTC)