The solar fire thread — Ra’s ray, the reign of rulers, the red dawn, the goddesses Rhea and Rheda.
🌞 The RA / RE Solar Mandala
At the center:
R _ (RA / RE)
→ Root sound for “ray, radiance, rulership.”
→ Egyptian Ra, the sun itself.
Radiating Outward
Egypt
Ra — the great sun god, giver of life.
Re — variant spelling in hieroglyphic transliteration.
Renpet — the year, renewal, also feminine.
Mediterranean / Classical
Rhea — Greek mother goddess, wife of Kronos, name carries the re of flow and fertility.
Regis / Rex (Latin) — king, ruler by divine right (literally “he who radiates”).
Regnum — reign, kingdom.
Radius — spoke, ray of light.
Romance Languages
Rey (Spanish) — king.
Roi (French) — king.
Reina — queen.
Germanic / Northern Europe
Rheda / Hreda — March goddess of fierce renewal, linked to the red fire of dawn.
Red — color of fire, blood, and sunrise.
Ray — beam of light.
Reign — ruling, shining forth authority.
English / Modern Echoes
Ray — sunlight, energy.
Red — first visible color at dawn, fire itself.
Royal — from regalis, of kings.
Radiance — brightness, divine light.
Pattern
From Ra in Egypt to Rheda in Germany, the solar sound RE/RA carried three linked meanings wherever it traveled:
Light / Ray — the sun’s fire.
Rule / Reign — authority derived from that fire.
Red — the visible sign of dawn and blood, the life-force.
Red, Rheda, and Ray: The Forgotten Solar Sister
When you think of the word red, what comes to mind?
The color of fire. The glow of dawn. The flush of blood and vitality.
But follow this word back through history, and you discover something extraordinary: it isn’t just about color. It’s about light itself—the rays of the sun, the reign of kings, the cycle of time. Hidden in the words red, ray, reign, rey, Ra, Rheda lies one of humanity’s oldest stories: how we learned to live by the fire in the sky.
Ra, the Original Ray
In ancient Egypt, the sun was not an object. It was a being.
Ra, the great solar god, sailed his fiery barque across the heavens each day and passed through the underworld each night, reborn at dawn. His rays were not metaphor but substance—threads of divine energy that sustained life, crowned rulers, and marked the Nile’s cycle.
The hieroglyph for Ra carried not just the sound R-A, but the principle of radiance itself: the outward-reaching fire that makes growth possible. To “receive Ra’s rays” was to be alive, blessed, connected.
Red as Dawn, Blood, and Fire
Now listen to the echo:
Red in English, the color of dawn’s first light.
Rey in Spanish, meaning king—the one who rules by solar authority.
Reign in English, the act of ruling, radiating outward.
Ray, the beam of light itself.
These aren’t coincidences. They are linguistic fossils, carrying fragments of Egyptian solar theology across continents and millennia. The sound re/ra became the shorthand for radiance, for glory, for the life-force itself.
Rheda: The Forgotten March Goddess
Fast forward to early medieval Europe. The monk Bede, writing in the 8th century, recorded the old pagan month-names still in use among the Anglo-Saxons. April, he said, was “Eostremonath,” after the goddess Eostre (Easter). But March? That was Hredmonath, the month of a mysterious goddess named Rheda.
Who was she? Bede barely tells us—only that her name lingered in the calendar. For centuries, scholars puzzled over her identity. Some dismissed her as an invention. Others guessed she was a local war goddess.
But the clues are in her name:
hreda — fierce, powerful
hroden — adorned, radiant
hredan — to rejoice, to pray
hreo — glory, victory
And most telling: red itself, color of fire, dawn, blood.
Rheda was not just a domestic goddess. She was the northern echo of Ra—the custodian of the solar fire at winter’s end, guarding the threshold of spring. Her month (March) held the fierce energy of renewal: seeds stirring, warriors returning, fires tended as the sun’s power began to climb again.
The Solar Sisters: Rheda and Eostre
Seen together, Rheda and her more famous sister Eostre form a perfect cycle of fire:
Rheda (March): Keeper of the inner flame. Protector of the hearth. Fierce defender of life through winter’s final trials.
Eostre (April): Herald of dawn. Bursting forth with light, fertility, and outward growth.
Together, they carried the solar legacy of Ra into the Germanic world: one guarding fire’s protective power, the other celebrating its expansive light.
Why It Matters
When Christianity spread across Europe, these goddesses were absorbed, renamed, and largely forgotten. March became Lent, April became Easter. The solar sisters vanished into the smoke of cultural suppression.
But their names survived—in red, in ray, in reign.
Even now, every time we say “ray of light” or “red dawn,” we are whispering their story.
This is the power of language: even when temples fall and rituals are outlawed, words carry memory. They preserve what was once sacred. They remind us that the fire we kindle in our homes and the sun that rises every morning are part of the same eternal cycle.
The Fire That Still Burns
So the next time you see a red sunset, or speak of a king’s reign, or feel the warmth of a ray of sun on your face—remember Ra. Remember Rheda. Remember the solar sisters whose names wove across cultures to remind us that all power, all growth, all life comes from the same fire.
Red is not just a color.
It is a memory.
It is a goddess.
It is the ray that still shines in us all.
✨ Would you like me to also sketch a timeline mandala for RA/RE (like we did for MR and IS), showing Ra → ray → reign → rey → red → Rheda → Rhea → etc.? That would make a beautiful companion to this blog post and fit neatly into the book structure.
✨ This mandala shows how RA/RE is the solar seed-sound of radiance, rulership, and renewal — connecting Egypt’s sun god to Europe’s month names, colors, and languages.
RA (Egyptian Sun God)
|
-------------------------------------------------
| | |
LIGHT RULE COLOR
(ray, radiance) (rex, rey, reign) (red, rheda)
| | |
Rhea (fertility) regnum / regal red dawn, blood
Radius (ray) reina / roi March goddess
Radiance royal fire & renewal
Excellent — here’s a polished blog-style essay to accompany the RA / RE mandala:
đź”´ Red, Rheda, and the Radiance of Ra
Why does the word ray describe a beam of light, red the color of dawn, reign the power of kings, and Ra the sun itself?
Because beneath them all lies a single ancient root: RA / RE, the solar seed-sound of radiance and rulership.
The Egyptian Spark
In Egypt, Ra was more than a name — it was the very essence of the sun, giver of life and order. To speak “Ra” was to acknowledge the light itself, and every morning’s sunrise was his rebirth. Hieroglyphs record him as Ra or Re, the cosmic fire that ruled both sky and earth.
Egyptian words carried this solar theme further: Renpet, the feminine word for “year,” literally meant “renewal” — time itself measured by Ra’s cycle. From the Nile valley, this fiery syllable began its long journey outward.
From Ra to Rhea, Rex, and Radiance
As cultures traded, migrated, and mingled, the solar seed RA/RE radiated across languages:
Rhea — the Greek mother goddess, source of flow and fertility, carrying Ra’s radiance into the feminine principle.
Rex / Regis (Latin) — king, the ruler “who shines forth.” To “reign” was to embody the sun’s authority.
Radius — a spoke of a wheel, or a ray of light. Geometry itself preserved Ra’s beams.
The connection between sunlight and sovereignty was not metaphorical to ancient peoples — it was physics and politics in one. The ruler’s legitimacy came from the same source that ripened grain and kept time: the sun.
The Germanic Sister: Rheda
When Christianity’s chronicler Bede described the old Germanic months, he named March after a mysterious goddess: Hreda (or Rheda). For centuries, her identity puzzled scholars. But seen through the Ra-thread, her solar lineage becomes clear.
Hreda was guardian of hearth and threshold, fierce protector as winter loosened its grip. Her month glowed with the first red dawns of spring, the fire in her very name. She and her sister Eostre (April’s dawn goddess) preserved the two halves of solar wisdom: Hreda tended the protective inner flame, Eostre embodied the rising outer light.
The Color of Power
The word red itself belongs here. The color of blood, dawn, and fire, red was the first pigment humans mastered, painted on cave walls 40,000 years ago. In naming the color of life’s spark, languages kept Ra alive in every sunrise.
Modern Echoes
We still carry Ra in our daily speech:
Ray of sunshine.
Radiant bride.
Royal decree.
Red-letter day.
Each word is a fossil of solar worship, the memory of fire encoded in language.
Why It Matters
By tracing this simple root — RA / RE — we uncover a cycle of meaning as old as civilization:
Light (ray, radiance).
Power (rex, reign).
Life-force (red, blood, dawn).
From Egypt’s Ra to Germany’s Rheda, from Latin kings to English colors, the solar sisters of spring remind us that language itself is a temple to the sun.
The next time you feel the warmth of a ray on your face, or speak of someone radiant, remember: you are repeating one of humanity’s oldest prayers — a syllable born in Africa, carried by the Nile, and still glowing in your own mouth today.
