The symbol of today's Legal system-- the Scale of Justiceâ€"represents the best of equity, law, and peace. Its foundation of fairness shows as the equal sign between the right and left sides of a balance scale. But the Western world strongly and wrongly advertises that the Scale of Justice and what it signifies came from ancient Greece. The truth is that both are of African origin. Proof is found in the Pyramid textsâ€"the oldest known books in the world. They and the Book of Coming Forth By Day (i.e. the Book of Life and wrongly called the Book of the Dead as Europeans have named it) are similar in scripture and purpose because the latter evolved out of the former (Ashby, African Origins p139). The archetype workâ€"the Book of Life-- dates to 60,000 BC ( Saleem, Book of Life p 59, xiii) and contains the oldest religious writings in the world. It and the Pyramid texts, the Coffin texts, and the Papyrus of Aniâ€"each named separately because they were discovered by separate Europeans-- explain the origin, function, and qualities of the natural laws of the cosmos. For these messages of the Afterlife to have been put in the Pyramid tombs in the first place meant that they were already thousands of years in evolutional development.
In the Book of Life, the mythology and symbolism related to supreme ethics (proper/improper) and morals (right/wrong) were personified by the goddess Ma'at--also called Maa and Temu. Temu (Tiamat, Te-Mut, Nun, Maunet, Ma-Nu, and the Great Mother), an alter ego of the goddess Ma'at, was deemed the spirit of the fertile Abyss and goddess of the Amenta Night. She is the oldest of the deities, mother of the archaic Ennead and producer of the first four dual female elements, including the Amenta aspects (jablifeskills.com) of existenceâ€"Water, Darkness, Night, and Eternity (Walker, Mythology, 998; Walker, Dictionary 336, 351, 5). In the Book of Life, Ma'at (in the role of herself and Temu) is shown attending the balance scale at the judgment of the deadâ€"the weighing of her feather against the deeds of the deceased (symbolized as a heart). The scale depicted by the Egyptians consists of a leverâ€"the beamâ€" supported on a fulcrum in the middle. From the beam's extremities are hung two scale pans, one for the weights; the other for the object to be weighed. A heart "light as a feather" assured the deceased a heavenly existence. The same was done by Anubis, the Egyptian hybrid god with the head of a jackal who defends against evil and escorts souls to judgment (Panati, Sacred Origins, p76).
When Temu was "borrowed" around the Mediterranean Sea, the Greeks renamed her Themis (meaning the right or divine justice of lawfulness). As goddess of oracles, of law, and of order among all things, she was depicted holding the Scale of Justice in one hand and various things in her other hand (e.g. a sword, a dove, or a palm branch to represent the blessing of order). On the head of Temu an essential of the Scale of Justice concept is the Blindfold. In order to give involved parties their due, it indicates her impartiality in administering justice without prejudice, corruption, avarice, or favor. However, Western culture chose to violate all of this by using her sword as symbolic permission to administer bad "justice" of the "unfair, unequal" type. Their "forever" objective was (and is) to assure themselves of having unfair advantages while imparting on their victims (e.g. Black people) unfair disadvantages. On the cover of my book: "Anger In Black Americans" the African Temu emblazes Western evilness by holding in her left hand the Unbalanced Scale but in her right hand is the solution --the Sankofa bird concept of returning to African Tradition and internalizing its values.
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