Instruction of the rite: taking a solar scarab, the one that has the twelve rays, make it be cast into a deep turquoise cup, at the seizure of the moon,

The prayer is finished; now the papyrus does something that always startles a modern reader — it hands you a recipe. The word is didaskalía, 'instruction,' and what follows is craft: ingredients, timing, quantities, as matter-of-fact as a cookbook. To the people who kept these books there was no seam between the ecstatic ascent and the beetle in the cup; prayer and pharmacy were one technology. Every element is chosen for meaning. The kántharos, the scarab, was Egypt's holiest small creature — the dawn sun-god Khepri, 'he who comes into being,' the hieroglyph for becoming itself, because the beetle seems to birth new life from buried dung the way the sun is reborn each morning. It must be 'solar,' with 'the twelve rays' — the twelve hours or months of the sun's circuit. It goes into a cup of kalláïnos, turquoise: the blue-green of Egyptian faience, the color of the sky and of rebirth. And the timing is lunar — 'the seizure of the moon,' its dark, when the old moon is snatched away before the new. A rite about a man reborn begins by gathering, in a cup, the sun-that-dies-and-rises and the moon-that-vanishes-and-returns.