MODERN ORACLES: GETTING DRESSED FOR THE GODS
Artist, ritualist and founder of UnitePlayPerform, Melissa (Missy) Gilbert took two of our Rafi Kaftans on a pilgrimage through Egypt with the Academy of Oracle Arts, dressing each day in specific colours to work with the intelligences held within each temple. Her words on the journey below.
Missy: "Before I tell you about waking up at 2:44am to enter Karnak, floating down the Nile, crawling into ancient chambers, singing into stone, making offerings, ballooning above Luxor, or dressing each day in specific colour frequencies to work with the intelligences held within each temple, I need to tell you how I got there.
Because I didn't arrive in Egypt alone. I arrived through teachers.
Through friendships, lineages and more than fifteen years of studying ritual, art, transformation and what it means to live in right relationship, with each other, with place, with the more-than-human and with the unseen.
This pilgrimage brought 42 of us together through the Academy of Oracle Arts, artists, healers, ritualists, culture makers, practitioners, teachers and seekers, each carrying knowledge in their own exceptional and wonderfully different ways.
Forty-two echoed the 42 declarations associated with Ma'at, truth, balance, reciprocity, harmony and right order. They became a kind of compass for how we moved together through Kemet.
At the centre of this constellation were the people holding and guiding the journey: my sister, friend and teacher Isis Indriya, a peacekeeper and culture maker with a rare gift for bringing people, practices and ancient knowledge into relationship; my beloved teacher and elder Marza Millar, Grandmother Two Clouds, whose work with elemental medicine, sound, vibrational practice and the intelligence of place has profoundly shaped how I listen and move through the world; our brilliant Egyptologist and naturalist Mahmoud Khodeir, whose decades of knowledge brought history, mythology and the ancient landscape vividly to life; his protege Mohammed Aziz, carrying that knowledge forward through his own curiosity and perspective; and Ericardo Baldonado, whose grounding in spiritual ecology, ritual and service continually returned us to relationship, with ourselves, each other and the living Earth.
They didn't simply take us somewhere. They taught us how to enter.
A lot of our journey happened through private access to sacred spaces, in darkness, before sunrise or after the crowds had disappeared. This gave us time to actually be with these places: making offerings, working with sound, observing the light, moving through the architecture and noticing what happened in our bodies.
And every day, we dressed for where we were going. Colour wasn't just aesthetic. It became another part of the ritual and a way of working with the different Neteru, qualities and intelligences we were encountering.
Getting dressed became part of getting ready to listen.
I've travelled to places that have cracked me open and rearranged my understanding of what humans and landscapes are capable of.
But Egypt?
Egypt fucks in the best way."
@uniteplayperform
@iamofferings
www.uniteplayperform.co
Image credit: @alyssakeysphoto
ABYDOS
Death isn't the end of the story
DENDERA
As above, so below
Dendera was completely different. The Temple of Hathor is visually overwhelming. Colour, ceilings, astronomical imagery, columns, faces, pattern, there is so much information operating at once.
I found myself looking up constantly. Through the Hermetic teachings we were studying, as above, so below suddenly made more sense to me as something embodied rather than philosophical.
I was standing between these extraordinary celestial ceilings and the stone beneath my feet. That relationship between cosmic, human and earthly is already central to my own practice, so Dendera felt strangely familiar. It reinforced something I keep returning to: metaphysics doesn't have to take us away from the physical world. It can make us pay much closer attention to it.
COLOUR: Blue + White
MEANING: Blue connected us to sky, celestial intelligence and the cosmic realm; white to clarity, light and openness.
ORACLE: What changes when you remember you're not separate from the thing you're searching for?
LUXOR
The body inside the temple
Luxor made me notice how deliberately the body is moved through architecture. You don't experience these temples from one position. You approach, enter, turn, pass between columns, move through courtyards and into increasingly contained spaces.
I started paying attention to what happened to my body at each transition. That immediately connected to the six environments I work with through UnitePlayPerform: Space. Sense. Movement. Form. Language. Energy.
Change the space and you change how somebody moves. Change movement and sensation changes. Perception changes with it. Being there made me think about architecture less as an object and more as something capable of directing human experience.
ORACLE: What is the space around you teaching your body to do?
ABOVE LUXOR
The view from up there
We also went ballooning over Luxor. After spending so much time inside temples, suddenly I was looking down at the whole landscape, the Nile, agricultural land, desert, villages, mountains, temples and tombs all sitting in relationship to each other.
It changed my understanding of scale immediately. Things that felt enormous on the ground became part of a much larger system.
I loved that because it's something art can do too. Sometimes you don't need another answer. You need to change the position you're looking from.
ORACLE: What becomes visible when you change your point of view?
HATSHEPSUT
Become the thing
Hatshepsut's temple feels like it grows directly out of the cliffs. What stayed with me was the scale of her self-authorship. A woman becoming Pharaoh and using architecture, image, dress and symbolism to embody that authority.
It made me think about clothes differently. Fashion is often treated as surface, but humans have always used adornment to signal role, transition, power, belonging and transformation.
Throughout this journey, we were doing our own version of that through colour. Sometimes you don't dress to express who you already are. You dress to practise becoming something else.
ORACLE: What would you wear if you dressed for who you're becoming?
KARNAK
2:44am
We entered Karnak privately at 2:44am. That experience is still difficult to describe. Without crowds, the scale became almost absurd. Walking through the Hypostyle Hall in darkness, the columns seemed to disappear above us.
We worked with voice and sound inside the architecture and could hear how dramatically the resonance changed as we moved. This was particularly significant for me because I'm developing sonic sculpture and ceremonial architecture in my own work.
I could feel sound rather than simply hear it. Karnak made me understand architecture as something that can affect breath, nervous system, voice and perception. Not just a container for experience. An active participant in it.
COLOUR: Gold + White + a spot of red
MEANING: Gold connected us to solar intelligence and illumination; white to clarity and sacred space; red brought life force, heat and activation.
ORACLE: What environments tune you towards the person you want to become?
ESNA
Language doesn't have to be linear
Esna made me think about language. Being surrounded by hieroglyphs, I kept noticing how different this system is from the way I normally read.
An image can operate as sound, symbol, object and idea. Meaning changes through placement and relationship. As an artist, I love that.
We are so accustomed to wanting something to mean one thing so we can categorise it and move on. Esna reminded me that a symbol can remain alive precisely because it isn't exhausted by one interpretation.
COLOUR: White
MEANING: White became a clearing, openness, clarity and space for meaning to emerge.
ORACLE: What if meaning is allowed to move?
THE BOAT DAYS + HOPI RITUAL
Integration
After so many temples, being on the Nile gave us time to process what was actually happening. We ate together, talked, rested, watched the banks move past and practised ritual on the water.
The Hopi ritual was an important reminder for me that pilgrimage isn't about accumulating spiritual experiences or collecting other people's symbols. It's about relationship.
How do I enter another place respectfully? What am I receiving? What am I responsible for? What do I give back? Those questions sit very close to the idea of right relationship that has informed my practice for more than fifteen years.
The boat days gave everything room to settle.
COLOUR: White + Green
MEANING: White carried clarity and openness; green connected us directly to regeneration, fertility and the living river system around us.
ORACLE: What needs time to integrate before you move on to the next thing?
EDFU
Horus / vision
Edfu brought us into the world of Horus and the falcon. What interested me most was the idea of vision, not mystical prediction, but the ability to see from another scale.
A falcon can perceive detail while moving through an enormous field. That became a useful question for me as an artist and someone who builds systems: can I stay close enough to see what is actually happening while also moving far enough back to understand the pattern?
We need both.
COLOUR: Gold + White + Red
MEANING: Gold carried solar intelligence; white clarity; red vitality, action and embodied force.
ORACLE: What are you seeing clearly, and what larger pattern might you be missing?
KOM OMBO + THE NILE
Both can be true
Kom Ombo interested me because two temple traditions coexist within the same architecture, associated with Sobek and Horus the Elder. Crocodile and falcon. Different forces held within one structure.
I kept thinking about how uncomfortable contemporary culture can be with contradiction. We want something to be right or wrong, sacred or ordinary, scientific or spiritual, human or natural.
But being in Egypt kept presenting systems where multiple things could operate simultaneously. Then we were back in the Nile, literally moving rather than fixing ourselves to one position. That combination stayed with me.
COLOUR: White + Green
MEANING: White carried clarity; green regeneration, fertility and the continuing intelligence of the Nile.
ORACLE: What two apparently opposing truths could you allow to exist together?
ELEPHANTINE ISLAND
Back into the elements
Elephantine brought me out of monumental architecture and back into rock, water, heat, wind and bodies. I needed that.
There are times when spiritual practice can become so interested in invisible realms that we forget the extraordinary physical fact of being here.
Egypt kept bringing me back to that. My feet were on rock. The Nile was beside me. My body was hot. The wind was moving. Nothing abstract about it.
COLOUR: Sky blue
MEANING: Sky blue connected the body back to air, openness, horizon and the relationship between water and sky.
ORACLE: What happens when you stop searching elsewhere for the sacred and notice where your body actually is?
PHILAE | AUSET
Go find the pieces
Philae was deeply personal for me. Here we were working with Auset, Isis, and the story of searching for the dismembered pieces of Osiris, gathering them and creating the conditions for life to continue.
I couldn't not connect this to my work. I spend so much time thinking about what society throws away: materials, buildings, knowledge, people, relationships, entire systems.
Reclamation isn't necessarily about putting something back exactly as it was. Sometimes you gather the pieces and make an entirely new future from them.
That became one of the clearest instructions I received in Egypt: Go find the pieces.
COLOUR: White + Lapis Blue + Red
MEANING: White carried clarity; lapis blue connected us to divine and celestial intelligence; red to life force, embodiment and activation.
ORACLE: What discarded piece might contain instructions for what comes next?
GRAND EGYPTIAN MUSEUM
Who gets remembered?
Moving from temples into the Grand Egyptian Museum completely changed the context. Now these objects were being held, classified, conserved and displayed within a contemporary institution.
As someone who works inside cultural institutions, I found that fascinating. A temple and a museum both hold objects, bodies, stories and systems of meaning, but they ask us to behave very differently.
It made me think about what happens when something moves from ritual object to artefact. Who names it? Who interprets it? Who protects it? And who gets to decide what survives?
COLOUR: White + Gold
MEANING: White carried clarity and contemplation; gold connected us back to solar intelligence, permanence and what humans choose to make precious.
ORACLE: What are we preserving, and what are we actually remembering?
SAQQARA
I don't know
Saqqara was one of the places where my need to understand simply gave up. Going underground into the Serapeum and standing beside those enormous stone sarcophagi was confronting because the scale is so difficult to reconcile with ordinary assumptions about making.
I had questions constantly. How? Why? What happened here?
Eventually I realised I didn't need to resolve all of them. We live in a culture where almost every question can produce information within seconds. But information isn't knowing. And knowing isn't necessarily wisdom.
There was something incredibly freeing about standing there and admitting: I don't know.
COLOUR: Desert taupes + greys + beige
MEANING: Here we dressed into the landscape itself, stone, sand, dust and desert. Less contrast between body and place.
ORACLE: What if not knowing isn't a problem to solve, but a place to enter?
ABU GHURAB
Light changes what you can see
Abu Ghurab brought us back to solar intelligence and Ra. What interested me wasn't the idea of light as simply something positive or radiant.
Light exposes things. It changes what becomes visible.
That distinction matters to me. Transformation isn't always about finding something new. Sometimes the information is already present and we simply haven't been able, or willing, to see it.
COLOUR: White + Gold
MEANING: White for clarity and openness; gold for solar intelligence, illumination and the force of the sun.
ORACLE: What is already in front of you that you're finally ready to see?
GIZA
The whole spectrum
By Giza we wore multicolour. After travelling through specific colour frequencies across Kemet, suddenly we were carrying the entire journey on our bodies.
Standing beside the pyramids is ridiculous in the best possible way. I've seen them thousands of times in images, but photographs don't communicate their physical scale.
I stopped being particularly interested in how did they build this? I became interested in: Why do humans build?
What does a civilisation decide deserves that amount of labour, intelligence, material and time? That question immediately turned back towards us. What are our contemporary temples? Shopping centres? Data centres? Airports? Stadiums?
If somebody excavates our civilisation thousands of years from now, what will they think we worshipped?
COLOUR: Multicolour
MEANING: Not one frequency anymore. The spectrum. Everything we had moved through carried together.
ORACLE: What are you building now that deserves to outlive you?
THE SPHINX
The question remains
Standing in front of the Sphinx felt like the right place to finish. Human and animal. Intelligence and instinct. Culture and nature. A hybrid being that doesn't need to resolve itself into one category.
After more than fifteen years exploring right relationship between human and more-than-human, Earth and cosmos, matter and mystery, I found it pretty funny and perfect that the journey ended with this enormous hybrid creature looking back at me.
I didn't leave Kemet wanting to become ancient. I left thinking much more seriously about how ancient intelligence might help us become better ancestors of the future.
How do we build? How do we listen? How do we treat matter? How do we enter a place? How do we dress our bodies?
What if colour is language, architecture is relationship, ritual is technology and nature is intelligence?
And what if our bodies are still capable of reading languages much older than words?
Light. Sound. Pattern. Movement. Colour. Stone. Water.
Our miracle languages. Ancient and completely modern.
Perhaps that's what a modern oracle is. Not someone who knows the future. Someone willing to become attuned enough to notice what is already speaking.
COLOUR: The whole journey
MEANING: By this point, colour wasn't something we were putting on. It had become a way of remembering where we'd been and what we'd encountered.
ORACLE: What is already speaking, and are you paying attention?
Photography: Alyssa Keys and Academy of Oracle Arts
